The Environmental Impact of Filmmaking

Rebecca Harrisson: I'm Rebecca Harrison and I'm a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies.

So we are looking at the environmental impact of filmmaking and we're specificallylooking at props and costumes.

So we're thinking about how they're made, what techniques get used to make them, what materials people are using.

And then we trying to reverse engineer some of the ones that were made for the Star Wars franchise.

So we're taking things that people are really familiar with.

So looking at like R2-D2 and one of the costumes that was made for Kenny Baker, we're looking at Lightsabers, Padmé Amidala, big kind of red throne room dress.

So all kind of iconic designs and then trying to get people to think about them in a slightly different way, what the environmental impact would be.

So thinking about carbon emissions attached to those making processes.

Syu: My name is Syu, a Research Associate.

So my focus is on measuring the carbon emissions from the props and costumes of the film making especially for the Star Wars movies.

Rebecca Harrisson: So we're working with industry partners.

Our main one is BAFTA Albert, who are BAFTA’s big sustainability consultancy, and they do all the accreditation that you see at the end of UK film and TV productions to help get productions to be net zero.

So we're working with them on a bunch of different resources So we're hoping to create workshops for emerging filmmakers to get people thinking about this stuff right at the start of their career, and that will really embed this thinking in their practice.

We're also launching a website in the next couple of months where we're going to be hosting all of our case studies and findings.

And one of the things we're going to be offering is a very early stage calculator tool so that people can go on and they can make comparisons between different kinds of material to work out which would be the most sustainable for their asset.

One of the things that we're really keen to do with that is get people thinking about the differences between physically making something.

So whether you making out of plastic wood or metal or whether you're doing it CGI, because one of the really big myths about digital is that it's greener.

And I think it's because you're not seeing the process and people aren't really thinking about all of the material stuff that goes into making a computer.

The energy it uses, the serviers that are behind the scenes storing the information.

So yeah, that's going to be one of the things that we factor in and people will be able to compare and say, okay, well, if I make this out of metal, it might actually be more sustainable than the amount of energy that it would need to be done on a computer.

Syu: So that's some challenge, which is like every LCA analyst got.

Which is like the data collection is like the crucial part.

And then like because this one is more to historical physical props as well.

So it's hard to get the data access and we need to dig it from the archives, interview the peoplethat are involved in this filmmaking.

So then that's the most challenge that we facing at the moment.

And then also like we need to access like the data, which is like, some of them it's not documented.

So then we need to make like a lot of assumptions, which is normal for the LCA people.

But then, yeah, we need to make sure that we clarify in the future.

Rebecca Harrisson: So yeah, we're hoping to just get people sort of in a different mindset with this.