Being Human Goes Green

Good news from SWScreen, the screen agency for South-West England. They adopted the Code of Best Practices in Sustainable Filmmaking a couple of months back and are encouraging film and TV productions in their region to follow it. ‘Being Human’, a BBC drama production about a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost who share an apartment, will now have recycling bins on set and in the offices and is working on using much less paper for scripts and call sheets. OK, it won’t make the series carbon neutral, but it’s a great first step. Let’s hope that the next series goes the whole way.

Mind you, SWScreen give a lot of support and information to productions that want to go ‘green’, and it’s not just the small stuff like paper use and recycling. Accommodation and transport are big CO2 creators, so they’re working hard to get crews to stay in hotels which meet sustainability guidelines, to use local suppliers and to look carefully at their transport needs. To give just one example, last year they persuaded the crew working on the feature ‘The Boat That Rocked’ to use bicycles for short trips around the location.

It would be great if all productions everywhere go carbon neutral as soon as possible, but entrenched behavior and customs take a while to change. Let’s hope more screen agencies will be like SWScreen and help those who want to make the move to sustainable production.