Last time I talked about the fact that in order to get Colin on board, we filmmakers had to promise to reduce our environmental impact as well.  Here two more steps we took to get as close to No Impact as possible.

Rule 3: Reduce, Reuse, Recharge
For years I have been shooting with my trusty wireless microphones and creating bagfuls of used 9v batteries. About six years back I did some research and began sending boxes of dead batteries off to be recycled. It was better than chucking them, but still did not feel right. At the start of the NIM shooting I went back to the web and found some great rechargeable 9v lithium batteries. (http://www.ipowerus.com/). Over the course of one and a half years of shooting I used 4 batteries… and they are still going. The old way I would have used more than 250!

Rule 4: No Cars Allowed
Colin and Michelle swore off carbon producing transportation from day one, so we pledged not to use a production vehicle…or at least not to use one with a combustion engine. The film was shot almost entirely with a one-man crew. That would usually be me, with my little camera and a wireless microphone. It all fit into a backpack and made taking the subway to shoots easy. Biking soon became the NIM form of transportation. Ordinarily I would shoot someone on a bike from the back of a car, getting smooth tracking shots, but that was out of the question. My first solution was to hire a petty cab (bike taxi) and shoot from there. But with the streets of NYC less than smooth, that proved to be rather bumpy. It wasn’t long before I found myself riding on my own bike, camera cradled under one hand shooting, weaving between potholes and shooting Colin and Michelle on their No Impact SUV… a specially built tricycle made of recycled materials.

Reexamining the process
I found that spending time documenting Colin, Michelle and the No Impact project forced me to reexamine everything I was doing. It changed the way I went about filmmaking, and it also changed the way I live my life.  The fact of the matter is that some things are easy to change and other things are difficult and complex equations… but until we start asking ourselves these questions we will never change. And that is the message that I hope to convey with this film.

So asked the curly haired first grader looking sternly at Colin, aka No Impact Man. Colin glanced at me standing next to him with the camera and laughed. We were at an Earth Day talk at a local elementary school midway through the No Impact year. Colin sighed and then said, pointing at me, “I’m not making a movie… he is.”

To be honest, Colin didn’t want to make a movie at first. When Laura (co-director), Eden (producer), and I had dinner with Michelle the week before the No Impact year was to begin and hatched the plan to make a documentary, Colin was not on board. I think that he had seen the No Impact year as a chance to step back from the grind of his NY lifestyle, a respite of sorts. Having a filmmaker in his home was not exactly what he was looking for. Who could blame him?

Still, we set to work convincing him. We explained that a film could humanize the project, show the challenges and the benefits of the project, and most importantly it could reach and teach a lot of people. Colin slowly opened to it, but he had some conditions. At the top of the list he wanted us to make the film in the most sustainable way possible. As the wise first-grader who questioned the sustainability of making a movie proved, separating the film from Colin’s project was not going to be possible. We could not be hanging out with Colin ignoring our footprint while he was working hard to control his. I agreed and set out to think about the process and how we could improve it.

To keep our filmmaking as low-impact as possible, we developed a few basic rules to stick to. Here are the first two, and next week I will talk about a couple more.

Rule 1: Buy Nothing New
One of the stages of the NIM project for Colin and Michelle was to buy nothing that was new. As a filmmaker, when starting a new project it is customary to gear up. These days there is a new and better camera out every 6 months. The camera I had on hand, the Panasonic 100a, was far from the top of the line…. but I knew it could do the job. At the time, I had recently seen it create beautiful images for films such as Murder Ball and Iraq in Fragments. And for me it is all about content, so we went with what we had. It saved us time and it saved us money too.

Rule 2: No Electricity, No Lights, No Big Deal
We decided to shoot the film without using added lights. This contributed to the intimate feeling we wanted of the family at home. It was less gear to carry around (on the subway). Halfway through the NIM year Colin and Michelle completely turned off the electricity in their apartment. At night we made sure they had enough candles and when it got too dark to shoot we went home. Simple. On the camera I used some gain and slowed down the shutter. It felt grainy, gritty but real.