Eco changes made to the film industry also beg a final question: How green is the theatre experience (now that at least some folks are returning after Covid)? The changeover to total digital production in both the filmmaking process and in the delivery and projection of film may create a new manufacturing paradigm that is greener than the nineteenth century model being phased out. But the final third leg of the nineteenth century model still exists: the theatre, which is dependent on enormous energy expenditures to entertain and inform mass audiences in locations that usually average 300-1200 seats per screen, not to mention the enormous energy used to get people from home to theatre and back.
The need to light, heat, and cool these multiplexes (numbering approximately 35 thousand screens in the United States in 2012) is seen as an economically feasible expenditure. Spending billions of dollars alone to transition theatres worldwide to digital projection means the industry calculates the mass consumption of films will continue well into the future.
Digital filmmaking does make it possible to produce the low-budget independent films we explore in our book Film and Everyday Eco-disasters. The digital cinematography used in the powerful anti-mountaintop removal mining films of B.J. Gudmundsson and the humorous call to address climate change found in Jon Cooksey’s How to Boil a Frog lower their budgets, making them more financially feasible to produce and distribute. Even larger budget documentaries such as The Last Mountain and Blue Vinyl lower production costs using digital filmmaking processes. Technologies such as digital cameras, computer generated editing for both image and sound have made the whole process of filmmaking truly democratic.
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