Hollywood Has a New Kit of Environmentally Friendly Production Tools
Hollywood has always been synonymous with excess, and not just with its parties at Chateau Marmont.
I’m talking about environmental excess. You know the kind. Paper scripts piled high. Sets gobbling up energy by the kilowatt. Executives hopping private flights around the world with barely a second thought.
But in my position as a founder of the Hollywood Climate Summit, I’m starting to see signs of a quiet revolution. Not from the top of the heap (does it ever start there?) but from everyday Hollywood workers who engage with the technologies that get a movie or TV show to our screens.
These changes have the potential, one small step at a time, to influence not only how the entertainment industry does business but the toll that the business takes on the planet.
Here are just a few (of many) examples:
Final Draft and Yamdu Get Integrated
The industry’s beloved scriptwriting software has combined with Yamdu, a collaboration-minded production hub. The result is a system that allows a script and its many revisions to be in the cloud with “almost all aspects of preproduction and production,” as Yamdu CEO Florian Reimann explains. That means a lot less opportunity for errors that can prolong physical production — and a big cut in the carbon footprint associated with delays.
When the tech giant bought the cloud-based editing firm a few years ago, it meant big changes. Frame.io’s tools could now be embedded within Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite. That allows global teams to collaborate instantly, eliminating the environmental impact of transporting physical media and unnecessary travel. Just five years ago, an editor in Los Angeles might cut footage, export a heavy file to a hard drive, then ship it overnight to a director in New York. The director would watch it, record notes and either ship back comments or hop on a cross-country flight for in-person feedback sessions. Now with cloud-based systems like Frame.io integrated directly into editing software, that same editor can share their timeline with a single click. The director can watch in real time and add instantaneous comments, eliminating not just the carbon footprint of shipping and travel, but the energy consumption of continuously rendering and transferring massive files.
The Emmy-Winning Scriptation App Gains Steam
The program allows users to digitally transfer script notes between drafts — a critical feature that reduces paper waste. When a script gets revised, Scriptation (which won an Emmy engineering award) automatically moves all the notes to the new version, eliminating the need to print and re-mark up dozens or even hundreds of pages. And when combined with the production scheduling app Cinapse, it allows for shot-planning without a whole lot of extra data entry, making the process faster and more efficient. All good reasons why actor and director Rob Morrow invested in Scriptation.
Canva and ShotDeck Now Can Work Together
Say you’re trying to explain the atmospheric lighting for a scene. Instead of struggling through vague descriptions, you can quickly pull an image from, for instance, Portrait of a Lady on Fire from ShotDeck that shows that exact candlelit glow and drop it into your Canva presentation. This visual shorthand cuts down on miscommunication, reduces the need for multiple meetings and ultimately saves both time and resources.
EarthAngel and TheGreenShot Merge
Last year, EarthAngel, which “greens” productions for Hollywood, merged with the European sustainability-management company TheGreenShot, which deploys environmentally minded tech for use on sets and beyond. The enlarged company provides productions with a kind of one-stop shop to make everything cleaner on set, avoiding all that waste and CO2 tonnage. Emellie O’Brien, Earth Angel’s founder, notes that “our partnership with TheGreenShot marks a crucial shift — turning once-invisible sustainability data into tangible insights that cut carbon and costs” and giving the industry the sustainability app it’s been craving.
All of these changes, while seemingly small in the cosmic scheme, can make a real dent in our environmental challenges. Scriptation says its users prevented over 42 million sheets of paper from being printed — that translates to some 3.7 million pounds of CO₂ emissions avoided and nearly 4.5 million gallons of water conserved, according to the formula of the Environmental Paper Network.
And the Earth Angel-GreenShot union has led to a drastic reduction in time spent aggregating data for sustainability reporting, executives say. “We found that the amount of time spent on carbon data wrangling and reporting dropped by a staggering 80 percent,” says TheGreenShot CEO Max Hermans.
Despite the easy availability of these innovations, the industry still faces pockets of resistance. The pressure of tight schedules can make crews reluctant to experiment with new approaches. Some veteran crewmembers worry about these digital tools diminishing the hands-on craft they’ve spent decades mastering. And others fear the learning curve will slow them down during critical production phases or that relying too heavily on technology creates single points of failure. Like, what if the app crashes?
Yet as tech-savvy professionals from diverse backgrounds populate more production teams, these barriers are steadily eroding. A new mindset is taking hold. Combined with technology companies strengthening their security features, the momentum for these eco-friendly digital tools continues to build.
What’s really exciting is that these advancements aren’t just beneficial for the environment — they’re democratizing filmmaking itself. Since many of these tools make production less expensive, filmmaking can become more affordable and accessible to emerging filmmakers worldwide. A cloud-based workflow means a documentarian in Bristol can collaborate with an editor in Bangkok without expensive travel. And subscription-based software eliminates massive upfront hardware investments.
While many of these advancements can seem modest on their own, when combined I believe they form nothing short of a revolution. The stories we have long loved are getting told in new ways. That’s good for people and the planet.
Allison Begalman is co-founder of the Hollywood Climate Summit.
This story appears in the April 2025 Sustainability digital issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to see the rest of the issue.