Producing a corporate video is not typical blog fodder on greenscreenblog.com because it’s sexier to discuss the latest in green production trends seen in big Hollywood movies. However, the majority of productions made every year are not entertainment. Millions of short videos are commissioned by corporations to inform or educate their employees (and sometimes customers) about some aspect of their business are created around the world every year. That’s the type of video I was commissioned to deliver for a client* in early 2010 and I committed to producing the video “green” in all production phases. This is the second in a series of blog posts on greenscreenblog.com where I will discuss those green production practices.
Planning and pre-production
In my opinion, this is the easiest phase in the production workflow to be green. For this corporate video, I completed all of the planning and pre-production required for the video using the following software applications in Microsoft Office 2007:
- Word 2007 – A/V script, production notes from client
- Excel 2007 – Call sheets
- PowerPoint 2007 – Basic storyboards for client
- Outlook 2007 – Production scheduling calendar, e-mail, and production task list
The client gave me access to a server running SharePoint, a document management system from Microsoft that is mostly used for corporate intranets, so I could post any of the production-related documents online for the client to review. SharePoint is actually very useful for online collaboration on production scripts because SharePoint tracks who opened the Word document on the server, when the document was read, what changes were made (if any) to the script by the reader, and e-mails each person involved with the collaboration when any changes are made.
Because literally everything related to pre-production and planning was done using software, there was no paper generated before cameras rolled. E-mails and in-document comments replaced redlines and handwritten notes on the scripts and storyboards that often require costly printing and re-printing of documents on paper that does not need to be wasted. Even if you take the SharePoint server out of the equation (which is the most expensive/exotic piece to which few producers would have access unless specifically asked), all of the steps that video producers take during the planning and pre-production stages with their clients can be done more effectively without ever printing a page of paper.
Recommendations for Green Video Producers
- Use Microsoft Office programs extensively in your pre-production and planning. Even though you may personally believe Bill Gates is the architect of a monolithic and closed platform (which is so totally different than, say, Steve Jobs whose monolithic and closed platform is magical), the fact is that the majority of clients around the world still use Microsoft Windows and Office.
- Utilize the free document templates available in Office to write your scripts, schedule your call times, and other essential actions
- If you don’t have access to a SharePoint server for document version control and collaboration (or you just can’t get over your laughably irrational fear of OMFG MICR0$0FT!!!!!!!!1!), try the Adobe Story online script collaboration tool. Adobe Story has many of the same features I described using with Microsoft Office and SharePoint, but Adobe Story is free and works on either Mac or Windows. The downside is that Adobe Story is an unfinished test product that still has some bugs which will likely be unsettling for your client
In the next blog post, I’ll discuss the green production practices during principal photography.
*It’s not important who the client was that commissioned this video, but if you’re curious then I’ll just say they are big. I’m not talking “we have the whole floor in a bank building downtown and couple of warehouses in different states” big—I mean “we consistently have multibillion dollar quarters every fiscal year even during a recession and could buy Denmark right now if we wanted to” big. Playing against the stereotype, this big company gave me instructions that the video be “short,” “entertaining,” and “show the product” and then let me do my thing.
Tags: Adobe Story, Apple, Best Practices, Bill Gates, Corporate, Corporate Video, green, green filmmaking, Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint, Post-production, postmortem, Pre-production, Steve Jobs, Video
Yesterday I delivered a three minute-long video I wrote, shot, directed, and hosted for the product marketing division of a large corporate client. Although it was not a requirement from the client that I do so, I made the commitment to only use green production practices on the video. The question that most people ask is: “If you are committed to delivering a video for a corporate customer that has you on a strict budget and timeline, then how does the added commitment to green production practices benefit you and the customer?”
The next few posts here at greenscreenblog.com will attempt to answer that question via a postmortem on my corporate video project from pre-to-post production. The postmortem will lay out the unvarnished facts behind implementing green production principles and their overall efficacy. The goal is to allow other video producers to read first-hand accounts of implementing green production practices and determine if they are practical for their jobs.
Tags: Best Practices, Corporate, Corporate Video, green, green filmmaking, Post-production, postmortem, Pre-production, Video
A furniture design student in Rhode Island has invented a prototype wall outlet that physically unplugs your device from the wall when the battery is fully charged. This means you can finally have a clean conscience about leaving your iPhone and laptop plugged in overnight and sucking down all that wasted energy through vampire power.
Whatevs. You’re lying if you say you always unplug your phone the second it’s fully charged…
The Outlet Regulator device, according to inventor Conor Klein, is “inspired by the behaviour of a leech” because “once full of blood, a leech will simply fall of its host to digest.” Klein even has a video showing the plug detaching from the outlet once his smartphone’s battery is fully charged. So it’s not pretty, the name is terrible, and it would take an epic marketing effort from Billy Mays himself shouting in your face about not one but two of these things for only $19.95!!! to have them sell with any kind of significant volume.
However, if I could buy that $19.95 today, I would without hesitation.
Tags: Battery, Billy Mays, Conor Klein, iPhone, Outlet Regulator, Vampire Power
It’s not like Kevin Smith is a ”green” filmmaker by any stretch, but for the past couple of days the director has engaged in a bizarre Twitter War with Southwest Airlines. The short version of the story is that Smith was flying standby on a full flight, was taken off the plane by attendants allegedly because he’s too fat to fit in a single seat as per the airline’s policy, and has been very public with his criticism against the airline with his fans.
Smith was on the flight from LA to San Francisco to attend MacWorld and promote his latest movie. Of course nobody knows the name of the movie or when it will be released or who’s in it because all anyone wants to talk about is OMFG SILENT BOB THROWN OFF PLANE BY NAZIS!!!
“There’s no bad publicity” unless you’re the studio that sunk millions of dollars into Kevin Smith’s movie…
Looking at this story from an environmental sustainability angle, the big question is: Did Smith really need to fly from LA (one of the largest and most sophisticated hub for worldwide marketing) to address MacWorld (one of the most innovative companies in the world) in San Francisco (arguably one of the world’s most technologically advanced cities)? This trip required lots of unnecessary jet fuel, electricity, gasoline/oil (the car that took Smith to-and-from the venue was required to idle in SF traffic), water, and food (although there’s evidence now that even a vegan diet isn’t that great for the environment)–not to mention all of the waste and carbon generated with this trip. Why not just have Smith address the MacWorld crowd from his home using iChat on his MacBook Pro?
The closer you look at this debacle, the optics don’t look good for anyone.
Tags: Debacle, Kevin Smith, MacWorld, Southwest Airlines, Twitter
An excellent article in the L.A. Times by Richard Verrier detailing the green filmmaking best practices employed by the makers of Valentine’s Day; including a fair amount of criticism of Hollywood’s environmental hypocrisy:
Hollywood, of course, has a long way to go before it can tout its environmental record. The industry’s routine use of use carbon-belching private jets to ferry stars, for example, doesn’t comport with a green mandate… [Valentine's Day's] stars were supplied with hybrid rental cars to travel to the set. Only one star had to be asked to not show up in a limo, according to the film’s producers, declining to identify the actor.
There’s no further mention of the movie’s lone environment-hating hypocrite, so I guess we’ll have to wait until TMZ blows the lid off that scandal. Harvey Levin’s team will probably have the name before I finish typing this blog post…
Here is the good news/bad news analysis on Valentine’s Day’s green production practices:
Bad News – Like 2012, Sony’s overblown disaster flick from 2009, the carbon reduction in Valentine’s Daymay have helped save the planet but didn’t save the studio much money in the process. According to execs from the film’s distributor, Warner Brothers “[w]ith the exception of solar panels, which proved more costly than conventional generators, the sustainable practices did not add to the cost of the film.” That’s not a ringing endorsement for any production company in Hollywood to make an effort go green if they’re not going to save money. A project pitch to a major studio offering the feel good PR of carbon neutrality (“and I won’t allow plastic water bottles on the set!”) won’t get the enthusiastic response of the pitch that starts with “we’ll shoot this movie wherever we can get the largest tax credit and cheapest labor cost.”
Good News - Because true environmental sustainability is about using less resources overall, Valentine’s Day should be rightfully praised for its extensive use of recycled production assets (with the exception of Julia Roberts) and reducing the environmentally hazardous waste generated by a production (with the exception of Ashton Kutcher). A huge contributing factor to Valentine’s Day’s eco-friendliness is attributable to the fact they shot entirely in the Los Angeles area–which meant that the production had access to numerous recycling, composting, consulting, and other environmental sustainability services such as Reel Green Media. The producers had access to the services needed to lower their overall carbon footprint from the get-go rather than the phony atonement of environmental sins after the fact. The lip service to environmental sustainability paid by the makers of 2012 (“Sure, it cost $200 million to build sets in Vancouver, blow them up, fly everyone back to LA on private jets, build more sets, blow them, fly everyone back up to Vancouver for reshoots, build more sets, and fly back down to LA to get ready for the premiere, but we didn’t hurt the environment because we bought $50,000 worth of carbon credits!”) looks even more pathetic next to the substantive work done by the producers of Valentine’s Day.
Obviously 2012 and Valentine’s Day are very different types of movies, but is that the best excuse?
Tags: 2012, Carbon Credits, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Neutral, Harvey Levin, LA Times, Reel Green Media, Sony Pictures Entertainment, TMZ, Valentine's Day, Warner Brothers
Wired reports that hackers “launched a targeted phishing attack against employees of numerous companies in Europe, New Zealand and Japan, which appeared to come from the German Emissions Trading Authority. The workers were told that their companies needed to re-register their accounts with the Authority, where carbon credits and transactions are recorded.”
Don’t you wonder if that scam e-mail was written with childlike grammar and ridiculously bad spelling?
My concern with this heinous crime is the fact that Hollywood will likely become the scapegoat. The popularity of greenwashing villains in hit movies such as Quantum of Solace makes stupid criminals think that all business owners hate the environment (and the government regulations designed to protect it) so much that they’d contrive a complex and expensive method/plot device to keep doing business as usual. Riddle me this, Batman:
- You’re a hacker that tricked a legitimate company into giving you $1 million in carbon credits… how are you going to sell those stolen credits to a greenwashing villain?
- You’re a greenwashing villian that wants to buy some stolen carbon credits… how are you going to “cash in” those credits without getting caught by the various government-backed oversight organizations?
Essentially, criminals believe everyone is as stupid as they are — and believe that the crazy stuff that happens in movies could happen in real life — which means Hollywood will once again become the target of blame and litigation when the hackers’ lawyer will sue Sony Pictures for leading hackers to believe their moronic scheme could actually work.
Lawyers should take a little blame here too as they would have a better case suing over the fact that Quantum of Solace had the same McGuffin as Chinatown.
Tags: Carbon Credits, Carbon Offsets, Chinatown, Goverment, Greenwashing, Hackers, Quantum of Solace
Like Michigan’s tax incentive program for movies needs any more bad press.
If you know anyone at Mind in Motion Productions, you should put pressure on them to do the right thing in this situation.
Tags: Detoit, Michigan, Tax Incentives
Business Week’s latest article on Hollywood’s continued pushback against mail-order DVD rental powerhouse Netflix is a compelling (but frustrating) read for anyone that wants a more ecologically-friendly supply chain for the movie business. Bloomberg reporters Adam Satariano, Ari Levy, and Ronald Grover hint at the dirty secret that many industry watchers already know but don’t like to reveal: Hollywood is a frighteningly closed-minded, monolithic, and paranoid place with an ancient business model… It’s the newspaper business with prettier people or music business with nicer weather.
The news and music businesses’ shrinkage was due to their inability to adapt to the new paradigm in content delivery technologies–the Internet. Rather than buy a technology like Napster, the music industry sued them. When a news outlet like Time Warner bought AOL, they created a walled garden. Consumers either rebelled against or ignored these models and those industries are devastated because of it.
Apparently now it’s Hollywood’s turn to do the same stupid thing. Netflix, the company that’s created the best overall online delivery network to consumers, gets nothing but pushback from Hollywood who still wants consumers to buy movies on environmentally-disastrous plastic discs. Hollywood likes DVDs because they’re cheap to manufacture and they keep 80% of the profits from every disc sold. Even though every Hollywood exec has a computer on their office desks, in their laps on their private jet, and in their hands (by way of iPhone or Blackberry) in the limo everyday, these same execs are completely blind to the fact that those devices are ubiquitous, high-quality, and overall green ways of selling the content they produce.
Netflix Inc. Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos encapsulates this idea perfectly:
“We have to fight against their fear that we’ll destroy the ecosystem. We’re not destroying anything. We’re creating a new opportunity.”
Hollywood on average, is ignoring both the opportunity and the overall reduction of environmental damage that opportunity brings to the table. Shameful.
Tags: AOL, Blockbuster, Bloomberg, Business Week, Content Delivery, Content Producers, Music, Netflix, Newspaper, Ted Sarandos, Time Warner
Seriously, guys… For a cutting edge multi-billion dollar media company that’s pledged to be carbon neutral by 2010 (next year as of this writing), your FOX Green Guide website reeks. The list of Best Practices for filmmakers are categorized by the various disciplines required to make a movie, but click on any three of them to see they’re a repetitive cut-and-paste of infantile “turn off the lights when leaving a room” advice rather than actionable sustainability production measures.
A searchable green “Vendor List” would be useful to green filmmakers if it actually worked. For example, if I’m searching the database for a caterer that is certified green in the Los Angeles area, I shouldn’t get results that include a coffee importer in Vermont and a water cooler hardware maker in Michigan.
What this website needs to give filmmakers, FOX, is links to the tools that make every production more environmentally sustainable. And when filmmakers chose the links they need, your website needs to generate a coherent plan that integrate those tools into the production so that filmmakers don’t have to wade through pages of repetitive “best practices” text.
Hey, I’d pay for that content if FOX offered it… well, until Google indexed it and “stole it” 
Tags: 24, Best Practices, Carbon Neutral, Fox, FOX Green guide
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) has posted a job listing for a Digital Media Workflow Architect:
This position will provide management for the research and development efforts related to the Digital Backbone effort.
Longtime readers of this blog will recognize SPE’s Digital Backbone project was discussed by SPE Veep for Environmental Sustainability Jon Corcoran mentioned in our interview with him last year. It’s a company-wide project that will gather, index, and store all of Sony’s digital media assets to increase their overall production efficiencies.
It’s not marked as a “green” job per se, but it’s definitely a position that helps overall environmental sustainability efforts. If you’re a movie nerd that also happens to live/eat/sleep digital media workflows this is your dream gig.
