Can CGI & VFX help your business reduce its environmental impact?

As the world looks to Glasgow to see what the outcome of COP26 will be, environmental impact is high on many organisational agendas. It is clear we must act now. Covid-19 has forced companies to re-evaluate how they operate in numerous ways, with working from home and virtual meetings becoming the norm. These new working practices, along with an urgency for the world to act, brings opportunity for companies to adopt a more environmentally friendly approach to how they do business.

As a business ourselves, we are focused on protecting our environment. Our studio is supplied by a 100% renewable energy supplier and does not use gas. Our waste is sorted by the waste disposal company: refuse is sent for combustion rather than landfill and any recyclables enter a closed-loop recycling process. We also promote a cycle-to-work scheme, with the majority of staff living locally who choose to either walk or cycle to work.

Working with CGI and VFX can help brands reduce their carbon footprint by creating virtual imagery for marketing and advertising that can be based anywhere. This removes the requirement for expensive travel to long-haul destinations and the resulting carbon emissions. To illustrate how studios such as ours can help brands operate in a more environmentally friendly way, we decided to compare the carbon footprint of creating a campaign we recently completed with the potential carbon output of a real-life photoshoot.

Using our collaboration with Equiano, the world’s first African-Caribbean rum, we based our comparison on a week’s worth of work in our studio with that of a hypothetical 5-day long photoshoot in Barbados. The photoshoot included premium economy air travel, a 4-night hotel stay, food and drink at an average of $50 per person per day, and taxi journeys to and from the airport and shoot location for three people.

Using an online carbon footprint calculator, www.compareyourfootprint.com, we entered our office usage data for electricity, employee commuting by road and rail, waste, recycling and water use. For the purposes of the comparison we assumed our employees travelled into the studio for the whole week.

The results are striking. One week of work at Where Giants Roam HQ resulted in 5410% less carbon emissions than a 5-day on location photoshoot in Barbados.

The creation of virtual photography and video content for marketing and advertising has many benefits to the environment and is an environmentally sustainable solution. Working with a CGI & VFX gives you the opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint of your business and provides the ultimate in flexibility; it allows you to showcase your product or space within whatever backdrop or setting you can imagine, frozen in time to be revisited at a later date for product expansion or amendments. In additional, visuals can be created from plans or technical drawings, without the need for a prototype, meaning that carbon emissions from manufacturing processes could also potentially be reduced. Here, we only create everything.

Come and walk (lightly) with us.