Six tips to turn your production more sustainable
✅ Choose your tools wisely: take a bit of your time to evaluate if the software you use to reduce or discard the use of paper let you achieve your goals. Make sure you can:
- Digitalize the hiring process, manage deal memos and contracts digitally, implementing the digital signature. This will save you thousands of paper sheets.
- Provide digital onboarding: try to distribute all shooting documents, scripts and schedules digitally, many people really prefer having them on their computer, phone or ipad.
- Incorporate the payroll company into your workflow and let it work through your software.
✅ Explain your challenge: explain your goal to your team and make them part of it. Why are you doing this? Why should they collaborate in this with you? Why is this important for the film and for them? Do not expect them to know your reasons beforehand and do not suppose they know the importance this has. Share the passion, raise motivation, give the words a chance and a mean.
✅ Ask your team to assign paper some value in their mind: it can be a monetary value, a leaves-roots-branches equivalence, a metaphor of clouds, white birds, dead kittens … or diamonds, rubies and emeralds price. Play and find what works best for everyone. The objective is to turn the habit of pressing the Print button into something conscious, and not an old vice, the kind of nervous fingers you can’t stop.
✅ Indispensable paper: provide solutions. If it’s a document you can’t avoid printing, of course, you’ll need to do it. But start treating paper as a resource and re-use it until it gets really full of notes or both-side prints. And consider some more tips on paper and printing managing:
- If you print scripts, use binder clips or fasteners which can be reused over and over, and allow to replace revised pages. Avoid plastic covers and spiral or coil binding.
- Printing: try to find out if your office supplier has vegetable-based ink. Do you have soy-milk in your fridge? Now it’s time for soy-based ink!
- Post-Its: they cannot be recycled, being self-adhesive, explore how to live without post-its 😱.
✅ Try to make your crew feel that the extra efforts for environmental reasons are a valuable experience. You can calculate the amount of paper you are saving in your film compared to a medium-size production and turn them into non-used trees (check out the calculator from the previous post). Send the team weekly and fun emails with the number of trees that were not chopped down thanks to their effort. Add storytelling if you want: invent brief stories of the amazing life of saved trees or just give some push words to the amazing team who made it possible.
✅ Share your experience: last but not least. We are giving our first steps into a greener way of producing cinema by now. We need referents, we need tips and tools, we need to know what works and why. If you made a paperless production, share your experience with others in blogs or social media. Be the scouting party of green filming! 🤗 💚