Jonathan Victory gave us a lecture about ‘green filmmaking’, which explores ways to limit the environmental impact within film productions. Mr Victory wants a sustainable career in this industry, but the industry has to be sustainable going forward for that to happen. Because when you’re on set, you see how much waste there is and usually in Ireland, we find a lot of litter scattered around. Typically, the stuff we do to reduce the environmental impacts makes economic sense and you could end up being smarter with your money.
At the start, Mr Victory gave us a scientific breakdown of climate change in general. According to the IPCC report on climate change, we’re heading for at least 4-5 degrees Celsius (instead of the maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius). Even though we’re already at the tipping point of calamity, it’s still worthwhile to do the best we can. Especially, in the field of filmmaking. During pre-production, there’s a big operation involved in analysing and organising the environmental impact (such as costume production; production vehicles; and space and energy bills). When a film is at its production stage, there comes to shooting on sensitive locations (such as having an economic impact when shooting on Skellig Michael, thus causing a downside to tourism and location shifts). In post-production, data and cloud storage as it leaves a huge carbon footprint.
American graduate Emellie O’Brien has been doing a lot of work on high projects, leaving a good amount of resources behind her. She’s an environmental consult of the film industry. At first, they didn’t know what to call her in this position. She then created ‘Earth Angel’, which is a uniform system that can be applied to an independent film to a blockbuster film. O’Brien’s dreams that the eco-supervisor becomes a standard crew member on every single production. Mr Victory showed us a case study on the Irish short film Catcalls (2017), where its production included caterers offering eco-friendly packages; having cat-creature suits made of Lycra; and hired three 1100-litre containers from Panda. Having an eco-friendly film production included an overall result of a waste diversion rate of 51.85%. More than half is a great outcome in terms of what impact your film is happening.
This is the world that we’re living in now. Climate change is the most irreversible force in God’s creation and it will eventually devour our planet in the upcoming future. And we need more films in the future. If, whenever I start working on a film, I should organise eco-friendly waste disposal on-set, including a separate bin for electronic waste.Contaminating one of the bins would screw up the whole pile. It’s not enough to do a list of things you want to do and say we’re going to be eco-friendly. You should have one person paying attention to it and that’ll make a difference. Mr Victory also recommended us to log onto Panda.ie and see what environmental impact changes can be done to our domestic life (e.g. explaining which waste goes into the recyclable or brown bin). It’s all about seeing what progress can be made. I shouldn’t worry about getting it one hundred per cent about being eco-friendly, but it’s about getting on the right curve. We’re starting to minimise the carbon impact.
Works Cited
“Earth Angel.” Earth Angel, http://www.earthangel.nyc/. Accessed 13 Mar. 2020.
Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, http://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/. Accessed 13 Mar. 2020.
“Green Filmmaking.” Green Filmmaking | Screen Ireland, screenireland.ie/filming/green filmmaking. Accessed 13 Mar. 2020.
Green Filmmaking. “Green Filmmaking Logo,” Greenfilmmaking.Com, 2015, greenfilmmaking.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/greenfilmmakingLogo.png. Accessed 29 Mar. 2020.
“Recycling.” Find out How Waste Is Recycled, http://www.panda.ie/household/recycling.html. Accessed 13 Mar. 2020.
Victory, Jonathan. “Green Filmmaking – Sustainable Film Production.” 11 Feb. 2020, Film & Screen Media Auditorium, University College Cork.
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