Green Crew Hero, Jaclyn Paris, Head of Development at Cosmo Street
Green The Bid Crew Heroes is a series that highlights individuals who bring sustainable practices to any area of the production process, and seek to inspire others to do the same. Production can’t happen without all crew-members (both on set and off), and the same is true of their support of Green The Bid.
This week Green The Bid’s Jessie Nagel spoke with Jaclyn Paris, Head of Development at Cosmo Street, about leading the company's green initiatives, how post storage is the invisible carbon footprint we need to focus on now, and how being a pre-med student trained her for an industry where you can also say, “What’s the nature of your emergency?”
J.N. What is your job title and what does that involve?
J.P. As Head of Development for Cosmo Street Editorial globally, I expand our talented staff, create mentorship opportunities, reinforce communication between our five offices, supervise our marketing coordinator, help build out new departments, bid new work or respond to requests for proposals, lead our green initiatives, and a bunch of other very random stuff that might otherwise get a little buried in the day to day pandemonium!
J.N. How did you get into the industry?
J.P. Most of us have non-linear stumbling paths into the film industry and mine is no different. As a former EMT and pre-med student, I was a research assistant on a book about modern maternity care while also working at a NYC hospital. One of our patients had an MPI (Motion Picture Industry) health insurance card and I casually mentioned that I was researching a book that would soon be the basis of a documentary. Turns out the insurance-card holder was a Producer in need of an assistant for her next doc about a neurodivergent teenager. I ended up deeply involved with that film and worked as its Production Coordinator ultimately. From there I went on to become an Associate Producer at an independent documentary outfit located at the Tribeca Film Center in NYC, switched majors and left medicine behind. Thankfully in the media biz you still have to ask: “What’s the nature of your emergency?” every couple of hours, which is nostalgic.
J.N. What made you interested in considering the ways in which the Post community could transition to more environmentally sustainable practices?
J.P. All the best and most memorable parts of my career have been tethered to some form of advocacy. The very beginning of my career focused on documentaries that spanned subject matter from a portrait of an immigrant family in exile out of Laos post-Vietnam — to traversing inaccessibility on the NYC streets with a blind man and his incompentent guide dog. I had a culture-shock moment when I was suddenly booked as a freelancer in commercial advertising. It took me a decade in advertising to fully realize that there are still a multitude of ways to hitch the ins-and-outs of our everyday tasks to the wagon of change-making platforms — regardless of the craft, client, budget or timeline.
Yvette Cobarrubias (Cosmo Street, Owner/Managing Director) successfully tethers social justice initiatives to everyday decision making; from approaching staffing with consideration of inclusivity and diversity, to mentoring women in leadership. She specifically introduced me to the Green the Bid team because she has a knack for placing people in their best light and she knew that there’d be momentum if she put me in the crosshairs of Tech x Advocacy. Cosmo Street was the first post company to join the Green the Bid.
J.N. You’ve embarked on a deep dive on data redundancy and storage. What are some of the key discoveries you’ve made?
J.P. I’ve had several record-scratch moments on this journey. First, my suspicion that Production & Post is storing media in higher resolutions than required to make final deliverables, for far longer periods of time than necessary, in far more redundant copies than necessary is happening at a rate and volume worse than I hypothesized.
Due to my involvement with Green the Bid, I’ve been schooled on the environmental impact of LTO tapes, hard drives, cloud-based storage, and data server technologies, fundamentally transforming my own viewpoint on how the post industry as a whole is functioning. I always thought that making a purchase of a physical item (such as a hard drive), one manufactured in a factory, packaged in a box, shipped overseas etc. would have a significantly worse carbon impact than throwing media up on the cloud. I think that’s human nature. I think it’s much easier for us to envision sustainability as changing the handling of physical forms: eradication of single-use plastic, turning off idling trucks on-set, composting our studio food waste, etc. The things we can see and touch. But it’s challenging to consider our environmental wastefulness when it is somewhat without concrete form. Sure our media waste is quantifiable in terabytes, but it is unquantifiable in its idyllic clean and amorphous state when we throw it on the cloud and forget it exists at all - not even considering the impact of the data center a thousand irrelevant miles away.
After getting acquainted with Film Locker and the amazing work they do abroad and through my discussions with their Sustainability Director, Victoria Harvey, I became aware of statistics that are actually worse than I’ve previously quoted.
10TB of data stored for 5 years on the cloud is roughly the equivalent of 34 round-trip flights NY to Atlanta.
Whereas the same 10TB stored for 5 years on LTO would be the equivalent of 1/4 of a one-way flight NY to Atlanta.
And here’s an even more potent visual: per ton of CO2 melts around 300sq cm of artic ice.
Meaning, those 10TBs for 5 years on a server melts just under 3sqm meters of ice. (We’re happy to cite our sources, and better yet – with a marker and a window pane we will “A Beautiful Mind” you).
J.N. What are some key practices you hope the Post community will adopt moving forward?
J.P. The post community needs a consensus-built, united response to some major new challenges. The first difficulty is that there are scientific inconsistencies in the accurate traceability and calculation of carbon values to even assess what damage we’re doing currently and a lack of access to those calculators for self-auditing. Next, there’s a hyper-focus on the convenience and speed of unarchiving, an obsession on the sexiness of new technology instead of a determined effort towards how to store assets in the most energy-efficient and condensed way possible. Our community urgently needs an industry-accepted moratorium on the shelf life of media assets and project files. Many of us are storing project files in such old iterations that no new software could reasonably use them. Many of us are storing hard drives without spinning them for so long that their components are at best unstable and their contents are potentially even unrecoverable -- while we continue to buy new ones each year. There is ambiguity on who is the insured party for retention of these elements. There is ambiguity on how best to recall these elements. Many of these practices were built on a bedrock of fear. I suspect we built these non-systems centered around redundancy and clutter to eschew file loss. But the key question now is – as a post community are we ready to unite behind the science of climate change and act on it? Are we going to take unified steps to treat a crisis like a crisis and adhere to a new set of standards and best practices that are better for our planet? Ideally what we do next could be scalable and replicable to even larger components of the media industry. I think we have a responsibility to be the first change makers.
J.N. What’s your superpower or hidden talent?
J.P. All single moms wear capes. Our talents are just extremely well hidden. We like it that way.
J.N. Do you have a hero or heroes? Who inspires you?
J.P. Without a doubt my two children, Arbor and Zephyr, are my little-big heroes. When you look at carbon impact, when you think about deforestation, when you consider the acidification of our oceans – how can we not be inspired most by our children?
----- Are you a crew hero or do you know one? We want to hear from you!
