There are many sustainable practices that can be adopted in the post-production phase of a project. This section is particularly focused on production roles who would be responsible for booking post houses or creative, production and technical roles involved at the post production stage. The following advice is from professionals already leading change in their field.
From your perspective, how can productions become more sustainable?
The whole post team needs to act in unison, and this requires coordination with those above. The production company, director, producers and post supervisors are the individuals who decide how and where post happens and what sustainable practices can be followed. The production itself needs to be committed to making sustainable choices. But the whole post crew can advocate for more sustainable options even if that isn’t traditionally their responsibility.
What are your top tips for sustainability within post-production?
- Production management and post teams choosing a post house that uses a renewable energy supplier – since electricity is the biggest contributory factor to emissions for post houses.
- Considering whether editing can occur on or close to set during production – this can reduce travel.
- Considering virtual editing, where media is ingested onto a post house server during the assembly stage and various editors remote in from home. This saves multiple drives being bought, copies made and couriered to post house and on to various homes. This could save on travel emissions with editors working from home. The editors then come into the post house for the fine cut stage, and the project and media they have been working on is already there.
- Using clean forms of transport for deliveries, such as Zedify which offers zero emission deliveries.
- Testing drives from previous productions to see if they’re in good working order. If so, they can be formatted and put to use again for shuttling turnovers, audio, etc., rather than purchasing new drives.
- When selecting cloud-based services from the post house, try to choose those with the best environmental performance.
- Ensuring that the last person on the editing team to leave checks all machines have been switched off at the socket prior to leaving, to reduce unnecessary power usage – except for breakout boxes which need to be left on standby to avoid excessive wear and tear.
- Not being afraid to start small: encouraging the team to use reusable coffee cups if buying coffee from outside the office.
- No longer printing on paper and keeping everything digitally. If there is a large team, investing in renting a water cooler to cut down on plastic usage. If a weekly shop is done for the post team, encouraging seasonal food/snacks to be purchased as well as food from the UK, to cut down on air miles.
- When booking transport for actors for ADR, choosing green options – such as Green Tomato Cars, or Addison Lee and Uber, who now have EV options available.
The assembly edit for Trollied happened in a port-a-cabin a two-minute walk from set. This meant that there we didn’t need daily drive runs or have them posted to another city. However, a calculation has to be made on each production: if the set is far from the home of the editing team and that team plans to travel back and forth often any gains may be lost.
On The White Princess, Linear Tape-Open (LTO) backups of the raw media were produced on set. This meant we didn’t need a runner to ferry drives to a post house and saved on travel.
Trollied: Roughcut TV
The White Princess: Company Pictures, Playground
What are the biggest challenges to working sustainably in post-production, and how have you overcome them?
Productions often want to use the same team or post house that they’ve had successes with previously, and are wary of introducing risk by choosing a more sustainable alternative. The low security of freelance work makes it hard to push back up the chain and demand change in behaviour from those who can make more structural changes. However, most people want to act in a more responsible way. We need to help them by offering risk-free, win-win solutions – ones that will save time or money as well as being sustainable.
How do you keep sustainability on the agenda?
Convening a post team meeting prior to the start of production to discuss options for increased sustainability would help focus minds and hopefully encourage better choices.
The easiest way to keep sustainability on the agenda is by setting up processes at the start of production that have sustainability embedded, for example with virtual editing.
With thanks to:
Shane Connolly, Post-production and sustainability advisor