Stomachs

The Off Hours receives Sustainable Style Foundation Tag

February 19, 2011AnnouncementsAmp, Coffee Candy, Craft Service, Energy Drinks, Fixtures Furniture, Footprint, Fruit And Vegetables, Fruit Vegetables, Future Productions, Gasoline, Local Brands, Local Farmers Markets, National Brands, Office Recycling, Responsible Choices, Sodas, Stamp Of Approval, Stocking, Stomachs, Water Bottles

The Off Hours is the first-ever film to receive the SSF Tag, the Sustainable Style Foundation’s stamp of approval. Â Efforts were made across the production in each department to make environmentally and socially responsible choices. Â Director Megan Griffiths and the rest of the production team wanted to create an example that could realistically be followed by future productions, large or small. Â No one is perfect, but when a production makes it a priority, shooting green is not so out of reach.

Based on this production’s experience, here are Megan’s top five tips for a sustainable set:

1.Â Â BUYING LOCAL

Stocking the craft service table and catering truck with locally produced goods makes a huge impact on the footprint of your production. Not only are youÂ reducing the amount of gasoline and oil utilized to transport food from far off places to your crew’s stomachs, but you’re also supporting your local economy. This goes beyond the fruit and vegetables you get at your local farmers’ markets–most cities have local brands of chips, sodas, energy drinks, coffee, candy, etc, which are as good or better than national brands.

2.Â Â UTILIZING SECOND HAND ITEMS

Part of the reason productions have such a large individual impact is that each film is approached as a separate and unique enterprise. The truth is that the basic needs of many productions are very similar–and not only that, but the items needed to build a set are the same items needed to build houses, vehicles, etc. Visiting second-hand stores for building supplies, fixtures, furniture and clothing is great for both the environment and your budget. And you can donate everything at the end of production so that it can be reused again by someone else.

3.Â Â RECYCLING & COMPOSTING

On set and in the production office, recycling and composting can make a giant difference. The amount of water bottles and paper that are thrown away on the average set is almost criminal. It’s the responsibility of the production to create a culture on set where recycling and composting are encouraged and supported. Given the right level of commitment, films at any budget level can take this step to reduce their impact.

4.Â Â SHOOTING DIGITALLY

Film is beautiful, but environmentally toxic, and videotape is practically impossible to dispose of responsibly. While technological waste has a big impact of its own, shooting digitally and backing your media up to hard drives is the most environmentally sound method around. Hard drives are reusable, and can be recycled by special vendors if and when they cease to function.

5.Â Â REUSABLE RECEPTACLES

If the budget allows, providing water bottles and travel mugs to your crew is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint. If you’re working on a smaller budget, encourage the crew to bring their own from home (most people have them), or at the very least to label and re-use their disposable water bottles and coffee cups more than once. If every person on a 50-person crew drinks three waters a day, that can add up to 150 plastic items added into the waste stream each and every day. Over the course of a feature shoot that becomes thousands and thousands of water bottles entering landfills on your watch. Don’t let it–provide a water cooler and receptacles for your crew, and ask your caterer to provide dishware and utensils at mealtime that can be washed and reused rather than thrown away.

Design and ecology: Julia Lohmann

January 6, 2010news, RSA Arts & EcologyBenches, Body Cavity, Cow, Dead Carcass, Disconnection, Ecology, Fellow Designers, First Glance, Lamps, Leather Sofa, Legless, Lohmann, Materials And Processes, Met, Mother And Child, New York Times, Riposte, Royal College Of Art, RSA Arts & Ecology, Second Glance, Skeletal Frame, Slaughter, Stomachs

Design tends to think of the environment in only terms of materials and processes; how do we make things in a way that harms the environment least. So it was great to come across the work of designer Julia Lohmann. I met her about a year ago to write a piece about her in the New York Times.

Anyway. To the p0int. Lohmann is famous for herÂ Cow Benches â€“ uncomfortable pieces of furniture that consist of a single cow hide stretched over a skeletal frame to form a headless, legless shape that looks uncomfortably like a sitting cow. On one level itâ€™s a kind of riposte to the DFS leather sofa, forcing us to think about the materials that the things we sit on are made of.

At first glance her use of animals appears repulsive and callous. Her graduation show at The Royal College of Art included a piece calledÂ Flock â€“ a series of lamps made from sheepâ€™s stomachs. She outraged fellow designers a couple of years ago with another seat shape calledThe Lasting Void, a sleek, futuristic pod that turned out to have been moulded from the inside of a slaughtered cowâ€™s body cavity.

In fact theyâ€™re quite the opposite â€“ a way of forcing us to think about our disconnection from the animals we slaughter. In fact thereâ€™s a tenderness about her pieces thatâ€™s more visible with the second glance. Raised in small-town Germany with a love of animals, who worked on farms in Iceland, she believes that if we kill animals we have a responsibility to know what we do, and to use every part of the carcass respectfully. As a student she had been fascinated by the reaction to Damien Hirstâ€™sÂ Mother and Child Divided: â€œYou kill and cut up a cow and people are outraged,â€ Lohmann says. â€œYet we do that every day. And what percentage of that meat is being thrown away?â€ Lohmannâ€™s work is an attempt to create something useful â€“ or at least respectful â€“ from every piece of the dead carcass â€“ even the cavity.

Unlike most design, Lohmannâ€™s pieces leave you with a very clear question. If your reaction to her work is still that it is frivolous and unethical to use dead animals to make her pieces, then what else about the way we use animals is frivolous?

Julia Lohmann in the New York Times

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

APInews: Artists in the Great Pacfic Garbage Patch

October 30, 2009newsApex, Beaches, Bill Weaver, Cantv, Chris Jordan, Garbage, Jarvis, Media Artists, Midway Atoll, Piles, Plastic Trash, Quantities, Skeleton, Skeletons, Sloan, Stomachs, Tiny Bits, Victoria, Writing Poetry, Yes Magazine

Five media artists are on Midway Atoll near the apex of the North Pacific Gyre, a huge circular current in which vast quantities of floating plastic trash are trapped. Artists Chris Jordan, Bill Weaver, Jan Vozenilek, Victoria Sloan Jordan and Manuel Maqueda are exploring the beaches, shooting photographs and video, writing poetry, and trying to respond to what they find, says Brooke Jarvis in YES! Magazine (9/16/09). The island of trash is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area twice the size of Texas where tiny bits of plastic outweigh zooplankton seven to one. found thousands of bird skeletons, piles of plastic where there stomachs had been. In some cases, the skeleton had entirely biodegraded; the plastic remained, unchanged. The article is linked to the project’s Web site. See video on CANtv.

via APInews: Artists in the Great Pacfic Garbage Patch .