Celebrating Green Crew Heroes!Astrup Rønning, Founder of Babusjka, Green Producers Club and Green Producers Tool
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 Mads Astrup Rønning, founder of Babusjka, Green Producers Club and the Green Producers Tool, about Norwegian sustainable production and bringing together the film production industry to tackle their footprint in Scandinavia.
J.N. Where are you based, and how has that influenced your perspective on environmentalism?
M.A.R. We are based in Oslo, Norway, and as the name implies, we are situated way up north where snow and winter is a big part of our DNA. Recent years we have felt the climate change creeping closer. More rainy autumns, shorter periods of snow, hotter and drier summers, and more comfortable temperatures during winter. This has probably influenced us.
J.N. How did you first become involved with sustainability when it comes to production practices?
M.A.R. The UN Report from 2018 was a wake up call for us. It pictured some really eery scenarios, but no one seemed to react.
You always hear that what I do doesn’t matter, I am only a small fish in a big pond, but we wanted to challenge that thought. If enough individuals actually did something, the claim would be worthless. So, we started to change our way of producing, following a check list we developed, counting about 50 measures.
J.N. How have you intensified that practice from your own work to encouraging for the entire production region?
M.A.R. After a while of producing more sustainably, we asked, what if we could change the whole industry. In order to do so, we needed to convert our checklist into a tempting and intuitive web solution. Which we did. Then we founded Green Producers Club, and invited every company in the industry to join for free. The only condition to become a member was that they committed themselves to use the tool in every production they did. We now count close to 70 members in Scandinavia.
J.N. What practices to you hope more companies will adopt?
M.A.R. As we expanded, and GPC got more attention, we were approached by a bunch of other branches in the culture sector. Could they become members and use the same tool?
We decided to expand the club, and develop a tool that is adaptable to every branch of the sector. Content production is basically the same wether you produce a film, make an event, arrange a music festival, or set up a theatre play. You will always need transport, equipment, food and drink, energy, and you will always produce waste. We named the new tool Green Producers Tool. We got funded by The Norwegian council of science, and onboarded climate researcher from CICERO, and are now in the developing phase, ready to launch this year.
We would of course recommend this tool, but most important is that everyone works sustainably, and that they have access to quality tools in order to do so. By quality tools I mean tools that are based on scientific data, and include green guides. It is in the approach to the production you reduce your emissions, there is no point only measuring them, it needs to be a combination of the two.
J.N. If you could do another job, in the industry or otherwise, what would that be and why?
M.A.R. My main job is to be creative director of Babusjka, a production company for film and animation, which I founded back in 2001. If I should do anything else, it would be to commit myself 100% to the Green Producers Club, and the new tool.
J.N. Is there someone in your life that is a hero or mentor and why?
M.A.R. There are a lot of heroes out there. Everyone that stands up for their beliefs regardless of the personal consequences it may have, is a hero. It is a long list, but recently I have been deeply impressed by the bravery of Aleksej Navalny, the Russian opposition politician.
You are also a small scale hero in my mind if you show the way for others. Doing is better than talking.
----- Are you a crew hero or do you know one? We want to hear from you!
