We're very pleased to announce that we managed to gain an Albert Carbon Neutral Sustainable Production certificate for our most recent documentary, 'The Farm Under the City'.
As our film was about sustainable living and Luke's journey is one that puts the environment number one, it was only fair for us to be as focused and stringent to ensure we are working as sustainably as possible.
For those who don't know, Albert is an organisation centred on sustainability in the film/TV sector. They advise, guide and support productions to reduce their carbon footprint and offset anything that is left over.
In pre-production, we completed an estimated carbon footprint where we calculated the amount of travel we anticipated doing, how many days in the edit, how many crew we'd have to food, how much equipment we'd have to charge, etc - all of this creates carbon and once you have an idea of how much you'll generate, you can find suitable ways to reduce it.
At this stage, we had a good idea of what areas would be the most carbon-heavy. Luckily, we were a very local production with a Sheffield crew and Sheffield locations. We were doing all the post-production from home studios rather than big edit suites, we could car pool between crew rather than all driving separately and we didn't have any set builds, prop buying or other departments that are carbon heavy.
At the end of post-production, we totalled our consumption to just 0.33697 tonnes of CO2e which would cost about £3.30 to off-set which we did and received our Carbon Neutral Sustainable Production certification. I can see this being much harder to achieve on bigger film sets with a large cast/crew with a more distant filming location, but this has given us the insight as to what we can implement to achieve this on all our productions.
Thanks to Albert for creating a process to tackle carbon consumption in the film industry and we can't wait to continue our journey to sustainability.