We're In The middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis
Filmmakers for future: wildlife (FF:W) is an international grassroots group set up to encourage collaboration across the wildlife TV sector and help speed up the transition to a greener, more impactful and less extractive industry.
OUR MAIN AIMS
To encourage collaboration on ways to:
- reduce our carbon footprint
- make more impactful content that inspires change
- move away from the extractive filmmaking model, how can we give back to the people and places we film.
Administered in Bristol, UK, we’re an international grassroots volunteer-led group. We provide an online platform for concerned wildlife filmmakers. Anyone involved in making natural history programmes can connect, learn from each other and from relevant experts to achieve these aims.
Why have we formed FF-W?
We’re in the middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis.
We make our living from wildlife and wild places, and large scale international wildlife docs are the highest carbon emitting genre of television, on a par with big budget drama feature films.
We are the global hub for wildlife filmmaking here in Bristol -the first UK city council to declare a climate emergency, pledging to be carbon neutral by 2030. Local authorities are already working with others in the business community to achieve this target.
Guidelines for greener productions have been available for over 10 years, but we’re still not doing enough.
Our industry, along with every other, has a responsibility to be part of the solution. The way we make our programmes, the insights we gain and the content we produce can all make us a valuable part of the solution.
As we emerged into the new world of working with Covid-19 we had to learn new ways of doing things. It provided opportunities to change for the better, how do we make sure we don’t go backwards?
We’re working alongside We are Albert as we don’t want to duplicate effort (please check out their website for the wide range of tools and resources available). In addition to these, there are issues specific to wildlife television which we can all try and tackle both in the UK and internationally.
We provide a platform and a community of like minded people for anyone with an interest to join, to take a lead, start a discussion and create action.
Everyone is welcome.
We positively encourage and need people from every company, level and department to hear your views and ideas, whether you’re development / production / crew / technical or editorial.
Our admin team and the majority of our members are Bristol based but we now have a growing number of people involved in wildlife filmmaking joining us from all over the world.
How?
Currently we operate as an online community of over 260 people via WhatsApp groups and Zoom meetings; we also have members only forum on the website which offers a place for more in depth discussions.
We hope to be able to go back to more in-person meet-ups too in the future and help link members in different parts of the country and around the world to do the same. This depends in part on Covid but also on the capacity of our admin team and members to organise these.
If you’d like to join us please register here and become part of our community. Once you’ve registered you’ll be able to request a link to join our main WhatsApp group, which will then give you access to resources and WhatsApp subgroups for discussions.
Subgroups aim to meet monthly, as and when needed or when time allows. Main meetings are held quarterly when each subgroup feeds back to the main group to keep everyone updated.
Whilst the WhatsApp group is our main port of information, our forum provides a platform for extended discussion, and to voice your own thoughts. It’s always helpful to introduce yourself and say how you found us.
We understand we all have limited capacity at times, so it’s great to have more people to keep things moving when others need to stand down for a bit.
We also collaborate with other groups (see below) working on similar aims across the industry internationally.
Who are we?
How it started
If you’d like to know how and why FF:W was set up at the end of 2019 you can read about it here in “Go West! 2: Bristol’s Film and Television Industries Report” (2021) via our friends at UWE.
The report as a whole has some really interesting data/information about our film and tv industry in Bristol including a section on natural history TV (The Green Hollywood p68-77) and where we sit in that landscape along with recommendations going forwards.
The full report is available to read online here.
Associated Groups and organisations
We want to play our part in our corner of the industry, and it’s encouraging to discover others that are doing the same. FF:W is part of a bigger movement and this is very much a collaborative effort. We highly recommend you check out these fantastic groups we have engaged with and learnt from along the way.
For more info on each of them, click on the links below to visit their websites, or head to our resources section for a more in-depth overview
