Sustainability in post-production
Posted on Jun 18, 2025 by Admin
You can’t fix climate change in post
We don’t know enough about environmental impacts of post-production to make it fully zero carbon, but we know enough to start making changes now, says Neal Romanek
In 2011, the BAFTA albert Carbon Calculator was launched by some bright minds at the BBC who understood the danger of the approaching climate crisis and wanted to help broadcast productions track their CO2e emissions. The calculator was put in the care of BAFTA and made free to use for the entire UK industry.
Soon, an organisation built up around that bit of software, which began to have a substantial impact on how content creators approached sustainability. But BAFTA albert’s primary focus – which goes for most media industry sustainability initiatives – has been on production. Once that footage is passed off to post-production, a lot of the great initiatives, tracking and net zero road maps become increasingly vague.
A lot of research has been commissioned on the major problem spots in production – travel and energy use remain the biggest sources of CO2 emissions. Sustainability impacts can also be reduced by smart procurement and food usage, and there is greater awareness about the huge waste of resources that can come from building sets, props and costumes which might only be used for a single day.
One pervasive myth that extends across production – as well as genres – is that the more that can be offloaded to the digital world, the better. ‘We’ll fix it in post’ has also come to be a part of climate policy.
It’s perfectly commonsensical to assume that building a physical set causes more environmental damage than creating it digitally, whether that’s in a virtual production volume or via VFX. Many are the horror stories from sustainability consultants who have watched multiple containers of set materials heading off to landfill.
The same green assumptions apply to using the cloud for live broadcast as it can substantially reduce the movement of people and equipment. Keeping in mind that travel is one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions, doing things in a data centre must be greener than in a facility or having to move gear to a location.
But the fact is, we don’t really know.
To cloud or not to cloud
Cloud providers are famously reluctant to provide fully transparent emissions data to their customers. At the AWS re:Invent conference in 2023, Amazon vice president and CTO Werner Vogels famously declared that ‘cost is a pretty good approximation of sustainability’. So the cheaper your Amazon bill, the lower your emissions. By this logic, the cheaper your flight, the better it is for the planet.
Despite research being done on the sector, we still don’t have a great idea of how much our individual cloud use is costing environmentally. We do know that, as an industry, the cloud has a global carbon impact larger than the airline industry and uses a tremendous volume of water for cooling.
On the other hand, data centres can be very efficient, automatically taking advantage of any idle computer power. But they’ll often also generate a backup instance for customers automatically as security, meaning the work – and energy – is effectively doubled.
However, chips are also getting more and more efficient. Each new data centre built can do much more than its predecessors, with less energy. And then there’s AI…
The point is, the environmental impact of data centres is astonishingly complicated, but we know it’s massive. We should not automatically pat ourselves on the backs believing that digital work is always greener than physical work.
Artoo Detoo vs R2-D2
Dr Rebecca Harrison, an expert in product life cycle assessment – and a huge Star Wars fan – researched the environmental impact of four selected assets from the original Star Wars trilogy as compared to their digitally created counterparts in the Star Wars prequels. One comparison was between Kenny Baker’s original Artoo Detoo costume and the entirely digital droid in Attack of the Clones. The digital version proved to be six times more carbon intensive than the manufactured aluminium and fibreglass original.
Digital offers flexibility, efficiency and creative possibilities that would be impossible in a purely analogue world. It allows you to try things out – whether it’s a rapid re-edit or new blocking in a VFX scene – that would be impractical in the physical world. But each of these new versions costs energy. The cost might be minimal if it’s recutting a scene at a single workstation, but rendering multiple versions of an elaborate effects scene to show producers on Monday morning has a much bigger carbon footprint.
Under your own roof
Whether post-production facilities have an advantage over the travelling circus of a film shoot is debatable, but there’s more control over the provenance of their energy. A post house can select energy suppliers that specialise in low- carbon energy – or bug their landlords to do so – and install their own solar panels, heat pumps or improved insulation.
These are the same issues that face most modern on-premises businesses, and there are endless innovations out there for inspiration. The site of Norway’s Media City Bergen pumps cold water from the nearby ocean through the building for cooling, while The Bottle Yard Studios in Bristol is powered by one of the biggest solar arrays of any business throughout England.
In 2023, the Canadian Media Producers’ Association of British Columbia published a report on sustainability in animation production, with a detailed analysis of a Vancouver-based animation studio. The report focused on capturing the on-site emissions of animation studios, and came with the caveat that ‘there are significant upstream and downstream impacts associated with manufacturing, transportation and products used in modern animation, along with the downstream impacts from streaming’.
Almost certainly the most thorough report of its kind to date, it measured the total CO2 emissions of facility operations as 56 tonnes per year. Of that, 33 tonnes were contributed by the energy powering its in-house data centre. A surprise finding was that 268 tonnes of CO2 per year were produced by remote workers. Multiple individuals working out of their own homes, each using their own electricity and heating – primarily from natural gas in this case – causes the emissions per work hour to balloon.
Taking responsibility
Increasingly, high-profile post and effects houses are being more public about their sustainability plans.
Dirty Looks, with offices in London and Brussels, became a certified B Corp in March, and has partnered with UK data centre company Deep Green, which uses the extra heat from its servers to heat a swimming pool in Exmouth, Devon. The company is committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2040. These ambitions still incorporate carbon offsetting, which – although it can have environmental benefits – has been increasingly discredited in terms of relevance to a business’ carbon reduction impact.
Other big players, like Framestore, are also highlighting their green efforts. The company’s Montreal branch operates on local hydroelectric power, its London facility is equipped with solar panels and its Mumbai studio has solar-powered lighting. The company is also working with its LA and Melbourne landlords to switch to green electricity providers.
We’re still in research phases with post-production and sustainability. While there are fewer variables than production, which can lead to more effective improvements in the march to zero carbon, the digital world isn’t always easy to measure, and efficiencies can be carbon bombs in disguise. In animation- and effects-heavy productions, post may well be the most carbon-intensive part of the process. A survivable future requires us to move quickly and boldly, but we also need better information about what’s really going on in post.
This article appears in the May/June 2025 issue of Definition
