Auckland filmmakers Jordan Mark Windsor Sean Wallace (aka THUNDERLIPS) on the set of their short film Help, I'm Alien Pregnant. This low-budget yet low-waste production is a great case study for others, says NZ film sustainability advocate Craig Gainsborough. Photo: Frances Carter
Auckland film producer Craig Gainsborough talked with friends for years about how to get people shooting films, TV series and ads in NZ to use more sustainable practices.
To help production crews in Aoteatora draw up their own "road map for sustainability" he launched Greenlit around 18 months ago.
Since then, many Kiwi producers have been using Greenlit's online tools and resources to minimise their project's environmental impact, Gainsborough said, and similar initiatives are popping up in other countries.
From a sustainability perspective, the screen industry is challenging because many forms of waste are produced and carbon emissions come from a range of sources.
Travel is probably where the industry makes its biggest negative environmental impact, Gainsborough said, with international film crews flying to and from New Zealand.
Vehicles play a big role, too.
As Aotearoa is quite a mountainous country, a film crew might drive 100 four-wheel drives to and from a location that could be 100km from a city.
Auckland film producer Craig Gainsborough champions sustainable production practices in the screen industry. Photo: Supplied
The perception that sustainable practices take too much time and money is another big barrier to their uptake, Gainsborough said.
This isn't accurate though, he said, as data shows that productions that invest in employing a sustainability manager also reap significant savings.
"You're not actually having to pay for [the] waste to go to landfill. You're not having to pay for a lot of other services. So it does tend to break even."
Although there's a misconception that sustainability teams are "all about waste-wrangling and bin management", they play a supportive role in production, not unlike health and safety officers.
"We see it as being a process of each team growing and learning how their departments can become more sustainable over time, rather than the expectation of having to meet sustainability goals, which might be overwhelming and unachievable instantly.
"It's about growing together and changing the culture of sustainability."
A crew filming the RNZ video series The Turning Point. Photo: Ocular / Monique Thorp
While the voluntary adoption of Greenlit's sustainability guidelines by Kiwi producers is really inspiring, Gainsborough said it would benefit New Zealand to have mandatory standards for domestic productions as we now do for international productions over $30m.
He's hopeful that the overseas crews visiting for these will take a lead from Greenlit's te ao Māori-informed sustainability framework which he said is grounded in valuing and protecting the whenua (land).
"If the first [assistant director] calls everybody together and goes, 'Hey, let's just take one minute to appreciate the whenua we're on and give thanks for it before we start our day' suddenly every single person on that crew is going to have situated themselves on the land and have respect for it for the whole day and that changes the entire approach.
"Little things like that take guidance from te ao Māori and really remind people Papatūānuku sustains us and therefore we need to sustain it. It's that reciprocal relationship that we're trying to embody within Greenlit."
Behind the scenes of the Emmy Award-winning 2020 drama series Rūrangi, which Craig Gainsborough produced. Photo:
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