How Movie Studios Can Commit to Sustainability: A Conversation with Brandon Geller of Sunset Studios

As we continue our efforts to green the entertainment industry, examining all aspects of production is critical. While screenwriters, directors, and actors play a vital role, it's the hard work of people like Brandon Geller, Sustainability Manager at Sunset Studios, accelerating tangible change.  

EMA chats with Brandon to learn how studios can follow Sunset's lead and embrace sustainability without impeding creativity. 

First off, tell me a little about your journey. How did you come into the sustainability space? Why the entertainment industry? 

Like a lot of people, I fell into the field. I was passionate about sustainability when I graduated college in 2008, but I needed to be made aware of it as a profession. So instead, every cover letter I wrote had aspects of sustainability in it, talking about the ideas I had to save resources or raise awareness of environmental issues, regardless of the job. After proofreading one of my cover letters, a friend sent me a posting for a sustainability role at our university, and it ended up being a great fit! 

I worked in University sustainability for 14 years and loved it. It was an interesting mix of challenges, from making physical changes to the campus to educating a diverse population of students, faculty, and staff. Eventually, my wife and I moved to California to help with some family responsibilities, prompting the search for new jobs. The entertainment industry drew me in, as I've long admired the power of stories to inspire change, and few places have as broad an influence on the world as Hollywood. If Hollywood could sustainably tell the next generation of stories, it could have far-reaching impacts. 

I got lucky in many ways by applying to Sunset Studios. Natalie Teear, the Senior Vice President for Innovation, Sustainability, and Social Impact at Hudson Pacific Properties, which co-owns and operates Sunset Studios, is very forward-thinking. She saw a need for a Sustainability Manager dedicated to the studios and parallels between a studio lot and a university campus. Like campuses, studios have a diverse and highly transient population, so you have to think about how to educate and engage people who will spend a short but intense amount of time on-site. In addition, both campuses and studios serve a wide variety of functions, and the work can be highly sensitive--just as you wouldn't want to disturb a researcher's laboratory experiment on campus, you don't want to disrupt a director's filming on a sound stage. The result is that one needs to be thoughtful about how one makes a change, constantly balancing risks and rewards and ensuring you are keeping your stakeholders informed.

It was fitting for us to host the 2022 EMA Awards at Sunset Studios, one of the first studios to receive our EMA Green Seal. What accomplishments are you most proud of at Sunset Studios? 

We loved getting to host the EMA Awards at Sunset Las Palmas. It was a beautiful and fun-filled night!

I am incredibly proud that Hudson Pacific was one of the first prominent real estate companies to achieve carbon neutrality for all our operations in 2020. But we know there is more to do, and I'm also proud of our ambitious goals for the future—especially our science-based target to reduce our absolute Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 50% by 2030 from a 2018 baseline. We have been working towards that goal by improving insulation and upgrading building systems on our lots. We have achieved Energy Star Certification for some office buildings at our lots. We also maintain a solar array at Sunset Las Palmas Studios and are looking to add more. 

Beyond our energy goals, we have made composting available at all of our studio lots and have been working with productions to remove barriers to composting their food waste. 

Lastly, one of my favorites is the beehives we have at Sunset Las Palmas Studios. They support local biodiversity and allow us to engage our tenants through "Meet the Bees" events and by giving away honey made at our hives. 

Have you found people enthusiastic or hesitant about the studio's sustainability initiatives? 

A mixture of both--everyone I've spoken to is enthusiastic about making changes and sees a need to address sustainability in the production space. However, every production has particular needs, strict budgets, and tight timelines, and the reality of production needs doesn't always match the ideal of sustainability. But I have found that if I approach people with reasonable solutions that are conscious of their challenges and competing demands, they are almost always willing to work with me to find ways to reduce their environmental footprint. 

What are your goals for 2023 and beyond? 

Now that I have almost a year under my belt, we hope to hit the ground running in 2023 with several exciting initiatives:

  • We are creating a streamlined system for productions to donate extra food to local food kitchens.

  • As mentioned above, we intend to add more solar arrays to the lots.

  • In anticipation of electric trucks and production vehicles, we intend to add fleet-level charging to the lots. 

What's a good entry point/project for a studio to start on its sustainability journey? 

With any sustainability initiative, building trust with key stakeholders is essential. One of the main challenges of a sustainability career is that you often ask someone else to change their operations or do something extra. When people are already working hard, asking them to do more is tough. To that end, I would focus first on something that people can be proud of, is a tangible win, and where you can do at least some of the heavy lifting.

I'd recommend starting with composting and food donation if they still need to be implemented. It is increasingly being mandated, but it is also very visible and tangible for the productions- crew feeds often produce a lot of leftover food and food waste. Caterers and custodial teams are already dealing with this, so you can add the infrastructure without adding much burden. Just make sure you go the extra mile to work with them on making it easy to do and to recognize their hard work, such as weighing and touting how much food waste was diverted from the landfill or talking about the number of recovered meals that went to people in need in your local community.

Once this is in place, you can build on that success. Studies have shown visible commitments to sustainability have a significant impact on the engagement of your stakeholders-- seeing consistent composting signals a real commitment to sustainability and will allow you to build the trust necessary to make more aggressive changes, like the dire need to address our energy use and reduce the Greenhouse Gas emissions that cause climate change.

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