Hollywood, with all the glamour, is known to be a town of extravagance. However, with the awareness of low carbon living on the rise in the US society, more and more movie studios, actors, and cinemas are joining forces to lead a greener direction in the process of filmmaking and film distribution.
According to various media reports, including ABC news, Warner Brothers is a pioneer when it comes to green filmmaking. They are the first studio to build a soundstage that runs on solar power, and they reconstructed the new soundstage from the old one by recycling and reusing 92% of the construction materials from the old building to reduce waste. According to reports, the film “Inception” was one of the films that had used the “Mobile Solar Power System” for shooting. The system generates around 72,000 watts of electricity with 36 solar panels, and helps offsetting 1 ton of CO2 emissions per day.

When they were shooting the film “Valentine’s Day”, Warner Brothers even assigned one of the producers to spearhead the project’s green initiative, to initiate efforts like the use of reusable set pieces, solar-powered lighting, hybrid for set pieces and crew transportation, and biodegradable plates and utensils for catering services. In addition, every member of the cast and crew was given his or her own reusable stainless steel water bottle. With 350 steel water bottles given, more than 21,000 plastic water bottles were saved. According to news, 67 tonnes of CO2 were thus reduced.

I have worked on a film set and I understand some less environmental friendly measures are adopted to achieve efficiency in the whole film making process. I remembered shooting a film, where every bit of snack, food, chips, crackers were all individually wrapped in very small portion. With hundreds of plastic water bottles and lunch boxes consumed a day, one could imagine how much waste it had made on one single shooting day. Indeed, if you look into the example “Valentine’s Day” sets, it is really not that difficult to produce a greener film. With the exception of solar-powered device which may incur high investment cost, other measures are easy to implement and they can eventually help lower the cost of production as well. This is a win-win situation for both the environment and the movie studios involved, I really hope the movie studios in Hong Kong will consider making an effort to green filmmaking based on these successful samples laying before them.

In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of green films being made, and many of them first caught public attention at the Sundance Film Festival created by Robert Redford. The Oscar winning documentary “The Inconvenient Truth” and “The Cove” were two films that generated buzz at the festival before expanding into the theatres. Last year, “No Impact Man” became a media sensation. The documentary is a story about a man who decides to completely eliminate his personal impact on the environment for one entire year together with his wife and his two-year-old daughter. He is going all the way to the extreme, and alters his lifestyle by“eating only local vegetables, saying no to cars and busses but cycling, no electricity, no packaging consumption, no disposable diapers, no toilet paper, breeding insects that can decompose leftovers, no washing machines, no toxic cleaning products” and many more.

Like many people, I was skeptical with his extreme behavior at first. But after seeing the movie, I was impressed by the film. Collin Beavan, the subject of the film stated in the film that this was just a one year experiment to see what kind of habit change worked and what didn’t. It is through the extreme had he realized how some kinds of change in lifestyle were not as difficult as someone would have imagined. After a year, the family would then decide what changes to keep, and what’s not.

The story was told in a very earnest and genuine way. Collin’s wife experienced hardship in this extreme low carbon living project but yet she re-discovered herself all the way along. I don’t think this is a movie made to encourage people living a green life in the most radical way. On the contrary, through this film, we realized that green life and happy life aren’t necessarily in contrast with each other. As Collin said in the film, the year without television gave him a chance to spend more time with his family, and built a closer relationship with his daughter. Based on their official website, the Beavan family saved 1,248 plastic take out containers, 2,190 paper and plastic cups, 572 plastic bags, 19,293 liters of garbage, and 2,184 disposable diapers in one year. The success of the film also encouraged some schools in New York to implement “No Impact Week” to encourage students to save our environment by changing some of their habits.

As for the cinema operation, many environmentalists are concerned about the current 3D movie trend. One English media predicted, 10 millions of 3D glasses were made when “Alice in Wonderland” released. Even though the 3D plastic glasses, in theory, can be reused as many as 500 times, but many end up being disposed after only a few times, because of the damages some audiences inflicted on the glasses. In Hong Kong, Broadway, UA, AMC and PALACE cinema chains have joint hands to launch a “3D Go Green-BYOG” campaign. From now until Sept 15, 2010, cinemas will giveaway one pair of free RealD 3D glasses for each ticket of 3D movie. Audiences are encouraged to BYOG upon their next visits of 3D movies. During the promotional period, BYOG audience can redeem free popcorn and movie cash coupon. So, next time, when you are heading out for a 3D film like “Toy Story 3” or “Step Up 3”, try your best to bring your own 3D glasses to help reduce the impact of plastic waste to our environment.