Comment: Post-production must treat sustainability as discipline, not ambition

Sustainability in post-production is often discussed as an ambition, but not yet treated as a discipline. As workflows become more compute-heavy, margins tighten and timelines shrink, sustainability is too often pushed into the background and reduced to a reporting exercise.

From where I sit as founder of a B-Corp picture post house, the issue is not a lack of intent. Most people in this sector want to reduce environmental impact and build more resilient businesses; however short-term commercial pressure still drives too many decisions. Facilities are expected to move faster, deliver more versions, store more data and absorb more complexity. But they are expected to do it without a clear conversation about the energy, infrastructure and people required to do that responsibly. 

Rendering, storage and always-on infrastructure already carry a substantial footprint, and the ongoing drive towards AI will only increase energy demand further. Yet one of the biggest barriers to progress is that most post houses still cannot properly separate the energy use of one project from another. If we cannot measure real project-level usage, we cannot report accurately, improve intelligently, or give production companies the information they need to make informed choices themselves. 

Dirty Looks participated in a prototype project with the sustainable data centre company Deep Green, where heat generated by our render server was captured and helped to heat a swimming pool in Exmouth. Following the success of the prototype, we intended to move all our compute over to a heat recapture service within 18 months. We rely on dark-fibre to carry uncompressed 4K video signals, but 300 miles from our Fitzrovia studio is unfortunately too big a distance due to latency. 

It pushed us to think more practically about what local, community-based solutions could look like. We are now exploring a closer-to-home proof of concept designed to support the Fitzrovia and Westminster community by capturing heat from computing infrastructure in a more local, usable way.

Post needs more than broad commitments. It needs experimentation, operational transparency and infrastructure that reflects the realities of how our work is actually done. 

Sustainability is not only about major technical breakthroughs; it is also about the choices made in the physical environment. In our new Maple Place studio fit-out, that has meant building with recycled plasterboard alternatives, sheep wool insulation and upcycled furniture wherever possible. In parallel, Dirty Looks are developing and integrating custom tools and dashboards to measure per-room and per-project energy impact. 

Many facilities and productions are pushing large workloads and their storage into the cloud. While hyperscale infrastructure has its place, if we are serious about sustainability, we need to look not only at where the compute happens, but whether the workflow itself is disciplined, necessary and accountable. Instead of over-reliance on cloud architecture, a more interesting long-term opportunity is to build smarter local infrastructure that supports post-production needs, and the communities around us, via energy circularity innovations. 

But environmental sustainability is only half the picture. If we talk about sustainability honestly, we must talk about people. Our industry depends on highly skilled freelancers and specialist talent, yet unstable employment patterns and poor work-life balance continue to push good people out. A sector that burns through talent is no more sustainable than one that burns through energy. People should be at the heart of it not just a part of it. 

One area that gives me real encouragement is Albert’s leadership in turning sustainability from good intentions into practical industry change. Following the progress production has already made on de-carbonising on-set power, initiatives such as SPARK, Albert’s roadmap for clean temporary power by 2030, show what coordinated action can achieve. We are now part of Green Champions in Post conversations to bring that same focus on governance, KPIs and shared standards into post. 

I hope production companies begin to ask harder questions of post suppliers. Not just how quickly can you turn this around, or how cheaply can you do it, but how are you measuring impact, how are you managing energy and what kind of business are you building for the long term? If buyers start rewarding facilities that can evidence better sustainability performance, the whole sector will move faster. 

Tom Balkwill is founder and CEO at Dirty Looks