Celebrating Green Crew Heroes! Eva Dvořáková Pérez, Founder of BGreen, Freelance Producer, & Commercial Department Manager at APA Czech.
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 Eva Dvořáková Pérez, founder of BGreen, freelance producer & Commercial Department Manager at APA Czech, about growing up understanding the need for careful use of resources, and the importance of inspiring others to join the sustainable production journey.
J.N. Where are you located and how has that influenced your perspective on sustainability?
E.D.P. I was born and have lived my whole life in Prague.
The Czech Republic is quite well-known for people being used to sorting waste at home. But it is interesting that people tend to behave differently at work, forgetting to automatically sort waste, with this being the last thing they think about when immersed in their work. Especially during filming, when it is all about time and people feel that sorting waste will take too much time.
I was brought up in a family where sorting waste and recycling is a matter of course. I was also born in communist Czechoslovakia, when there were no surpluses of anything, rather everything was in short supply, and so I grew up used to everything having to be used up to the last piece, no left-overs were thrown out and broken things were repaired, not simply brought new.
I think that that this “scarcity” of things taught our parents’ generation to be more appreciative and generally frugal, and they also avoided burdening the environment so much as a result, even though that was certainly not their primary motivation at the time. Of course, this changed completely after the revolution, when there was suddenly enough and even an excess of everything. But this behaviour was rooted in me since my childhood and I don’t like throwing things away when I can see that they can still be used, or replacing things with something newer and nicer, when the old item still works well enough for me.
General wastage of anything is something that I have always disliked and I am sure that anyone who encounters me during filming and has experienced me as an advertising producer committed to making everyone sort waste, recycle and use left-over material quickly realises this.
J.N. You have recently launched Greenfilming - can you explain what that is and why you helped launch it?
E.D.P. Greenfilming.cz is a unique information portal about the issue of green filming in the Czech Republic. It was launched fully by the Audiovisual Producers Association a few weeks ago, but the idea originated more than a year ago, when the demand for some sustainable filming guidelines began to grow in the Czech Republic. This was the first step that the Czech APA took in the field of sustainability in film and it published the Green Filming Manual last year in summer.
I started working for APA at the same time, and, together with the team that had been working on this idea, we started to put assemble this platform, which serves to provide free access to this information to everyone in a clear and well-arranged manner, in one place. As well as the Manual, we are also working on executing and localising additional useful tools, which lead to green filming.
We work with carbon calculators, off-set programmes, we hold lectures for the professional public and also film school students, we regularly write articles on the topic of sustainability in the film industry and a database of “green” suppliers for the film industry is also being created.
Green The Bid was a great inspiration for us in relation to the structure and content of the entire website. We also use a lot of the material from GTB and localise it for the Czech environment. We believe that we can contribute to a natural change in behaviour in the future through positive motivation of producers and crews. And because this information will be easily accessible in one place, it will spread more quickly among people in the film industry.
J.N. You also have started a sustainability consultancy for productions in the Czech Republic. Tell us a little more about what you offer.
E.D.P. Yes, during the lectures we prepared at APA last year, it became increasingly clear that although producers are interested in this topic, the fact that they were already short of time, coupled with the complexity of sustainable filming, was the main obstacle in this matter. Many of my producer colleagues started to contact me asking me to visit their production offices and plan execution of a specific project more sustainably.
This interest gave rise to the idea of improving access to sustainable filming and offering a consultancy service to anyone who is interested in this topic, but does not have time to immerse themselves in this topic more deeply. Although the Greenfilming platform offers all the manuals and sources of information, putting them into practice is another step, which requires a truly complex approach that is specific to each project. And this is why the BGreen service was born.
We launched with my colleague Jan Hlavsa, who is a freelance producer like me and has been interested in sustainability for some time. Because who better to advise you how to apply sustainability principles to your project then another producer who has previous experience with this subject. At BGreen we offer turn-key consultation of projects, from pre-production, through filming and implementation of rules on set, to recycling materials from filming, calculation of the carbon footprint and final offset.
J.N. The Czech Republic is a very popular location for location shoots. How do you ensure that sustainability practices are conveyed to partners coming from other countries?
E.D.P. It needs time of course, but our experience of foreign productions who come to the Czech Republic is that sustainable procedures are not explicitly required or required only occasionally, but they always appreciate when they see that we observe sustainable procedures. So I hope that if we manage to expand this system and offer something that is already implemented and 100% functional, then very few clients or foreign producers will refuse to take this route, even though this means increased costs. The cost of sustainable filming is minimal in relation to the entire budget, it is just about making the decision on time and having someone with enough experience to do it.
J.N. The CZ production community is world renowned for its art department. How do you think art departments in particular can rise to the challenge of sustainable production?
E.D.P. I think that there has also been a lot of success in this field. One of the ways we can create and produce in a more sustainable manner is naturally to use recycled building materials, which the biggest construction companies in this country already do automatically and use chipboard from recycled wood waste for major studio construction work. However, one major challenge for us is what happens to all this material after filming has finished. We recently managed to establish an excellent partnership with an organisation called Art ReUSE, which temporarily stores all our used material and offers it to artists for their work. We are very pleased with this partnership, because most of the material we have taken to Art ReUSE disappears within a few days and is used by galleries, art schools or theatres, who then send photographs of realised projects and their thanks. But we actually want to thank these people ourselves, because our material, which would otherwise be taken to a waste dump, lives on and continues to be useful.
J.N. How do you see sustainable practices influencing Czech production in the future?
E.D.P. We can see that Czech producers are very open to and interested in sustainability. Thanks to this, we are able to create and expand the list of suppliers and services offering sustainable procedures very quickly indeed – from re-cups and re-boxes - reusable packaging for food, through catering services offering seasonal foods, compost facilities processing left-overs from film catering and electric car hire services for filming, to the aforementioned reuse centres and local offset programs.
Every month we discover at least one new supplier or service on the market and I believe that sustainable filming will be a standard to some degree for most Czech producers within a year.
J.N. What are some sustainability measures you wish would be come standard practice whether or not a consultant is in place?
E.D.P. I think that eliminating waste is the most important. Cutting down on all disposable items, eliminating plastic and recycling correctly are steps that everyone can take. At APA, we are now working with a Prague electricity supplier on setting up a way to make connection to the electricity grid easier for film-makers, so I hope that it will soon be possible to connect to the grid practically anywhere as standard and there will be absolutely no need to use diesel power generators, because I get goosebumps when I see all the smoke produced when one of them is started.
J.N. You’ve accomplished so much in a relatively short period of time. How do you stay motivated and optimistic?
E.D.P. My biggest motivation is probably my fear of what will be left when we are gone and what the planet our children will be living on will look like. And also the enthusiastic responses from the people I tell about all these activities and my green dreams and when I see how easy it is to get people interested in them. I can see that many people around me have the same fear and you just have to nudge them in the right direction and provide some advice and they become as enthusiastic as me on the topic. And this, in turn, gives me more optimism and energy to tell more people and make sustainability easier, more accessible and more natural in their everyday lives, and not just during filming.
J.N. Who is a hero to you?
E.D.P. There are a lot of heroes in my life and people who motivate and inspire me. This certainly includes my husband who has always supported me and helps me with all the steps I take. And also my friend and executive producer Pavla Burgetova Callegari, who acquainted me with the entire Green The Bid team and gave me the idea of establishing the BGreen Company and is my great advisor and motivator.
Right now, however, my greatest hero is the Ukrainian people led by their president Volodymir Zelensky, who are all fighting for their freedom and for the right to choose just a few hundred kilometres away from us. They fight for the freedom and therefore also the obligation to do everything we can to save this planet, not just for ourselves, but for all Ukrainians dying while fighting for us and our lives not far from us.
----- Are you a crew hero or do you know one? We want to hear from you!
