The Tie-In

This week on The Tie-In, Zena sits down with Kent Hayward, a filmmaker, author of Green Filmmaking (Routledge, 2025), professor of production at California State University Long Beach, and co-founder and Vice-Chair of the Green Film School Alliance (GFSA). Kent traces his path from visual effects work on models, miniatures, and composites to teaching production. Seeing how much material big shows...

This week on The Tie-In, Zena and Mark sit down with Jonathan Bricklin: an entrepreneur, filmmaker, writer, and co-founder of SPIN ping-pong social clubs and the Little People Social Club (LPSC), opening in Lower Manhattan. Jonathan shares how a ping pong obsession at 30 turned into nine social clubs, and how a short film he made in college planted the seed for LPSC decades later. He walks through...

This week on The Tie-In, Zena sits down with Elly Ventura, Manager of Circularity & Customer Engagement at World Centric and a US Composting Council Certified Composting Professional, to talk about what it takes to get compostable foodware back into the soil. Elly traces her path from a family farm in Ohio, through athletic training and psychology, to a decade in solid waste management in Verm...

This week on The Tie-In, Mark and Zena catch up with returning guest Kerri Coombs, former gaffer, longtime energy consultant, and now tool designer at the GreenShot, about GridPro, the free power-planning app she built to replace generator guesswork with real data. Kerri breaks down why productions keep running massive diesel generators at a fraction of their actual load, how GridPro lets crews dr...

What does sustainability actually look like backstage on Broadway? Molly Braverman, Executive Director of the Broadway Green Alliance, joins Zena and Mark to break down how theatre's culture of resourcefulness and reuse is shaping its approach to sustainability. Molly traces her path from stage managing Wicked's national tour to leading the BGA, and walks through the organization's two-lane approa...

What if the most powerful tool for teaching regenerative agriculture wasn't a documentary, but a love triangle? Kelsey Crane, debut author of The Vanishing (Book One of The Exiles series) and a certified permaculturist trained through the Rodale Institute, joins Zena and Mark to talk about how she turned years of soil science and permaculture study into climate fiction for teens. Kelsey walks thro...

🎙️ Zena Harris and Mark Rabin are back! Catching up on what's been on their minds, from AI's growing role in daily work to wildfire season out West. 🌱 WHAT'S IN THIS EPISODE: — Mark's summer in British Columbia, powering Friends Club, a 350-person mountain arts gathering, with solar and batteries — Why everyone now effectively has a handful of AI "employees and assistants" working alongside them...

This week on The Tie-In, we're here with Brandon Geller, Director of Sustainability for Quixote and Sunset Studios (part of Hudson Pacific Properties' portfolio), where he oversees sustainability across facilities, fleet, trailers, and mobile power. Brandon walks through how legacy Star Wagons trailers are being converted into solar-electric power sources, how trailers now "daisy chain" to share p...

Recorded live at Pacific Northwest Climate Week, Zena Harris is joined by climate influence strategist Andrea Learned, host of Name & Fame, for a conversation on where film and TV production and city government actually overlap, and where they're missing each other entirely. They dig into why sustainability has to start in development, not production the "tacking it on" problem most production...

What does climate storytelling actually look like when it's done right? Not a green campaign or a lecture, but a reusable water bottle sitting on a table in a Scandinavian film. A farmer's daughter in a Hindi love story casually explaining why pesticides ruin the soil. In this Best Of excerpt, sustainable design strategist Simran Monga breaks down the difference between climate storytelling and cl...

In this Best Of excerpt, Alex and Allison, co-chairs of IATSE Local 600's Sustainability Committee, break down how the camera department is tackling waste before it becomes waste — from a year-round e-waste drop-off in Chicago to a free camera-expendables exchange with EcoSet in Los Angeles. They also share the story behind One Tree Planted, the committee's tradition of planting a tree for every y...

Tanner Watt, Director of Partnerships at Reverb, breaks down the Music Decarbonization Project — the campaign that took Luck Reunion from diesel generators to full battery power in three years, and the model Reverb now uses to green tours across the industry. We get into how Reverb builds sustainability into a show without ever asking an artist to say a word from stage: backstage food donation and...

In this Best Of excerpt, Neel Vasavada, founder and CEO of Overdrive Energy Solutions, gets honest about the one real failure in 50+ events, the 99.9% uptime record that followed it, and why he thinks backing up a battery system with a diesel generator is already outdated thinking. He also breaks down why power budgets almost never predict what actually happens on site — from an electric kettle ta...

Hans Dayal is a local fixture in the Vancouver film production scene, and one of the earliest voices building the actual business case for sustainable power on set. In this Best Of The Tie-In episode, he breaks down what it takes to get production executives on board: the real labor and cabling costs a single battery eliminates, how to build a one-sheet that makes the savings undeniable, and why r...

What if you could build one set — and use it for three different shows? Emmy Award-winning production designer Adam Rowe did exactly that. In this Best Of clip from The Tie In, Adam walks through the real-world case study behind "Good Glam Lock" — how a CBS medical drama set he designed in Toronto became a Netflix makeup headquarters, then a CBS law firm, traveled by semi-truck across the border,...

Dr. Ryan Wartena — PhD electrochemical engineer and battery innovator — joins Mark and Zena on The Tie-In to break down the clean energy framework any production can use today. This Best Of episode covers Ryan's two-question energy-budgeting framework, the difference between power and energy, the "magic trick" strategy for converting renewable-energy skeptics, and why he believes we'll reach 500%...

What does it actually take to eliminate diesel generators from one of the world's largest music festivals — not as a statement, but as a business decision that saves money? Ken Deans has been the power and production infrastructure mind behind Coachella, Stagecoach, and dozens of other large-scale events for over 30 years. In this episode he breaks down how a 2004 rider from Jack Johnson's managem...

Before Hollywood Trucks announced their multi-year deal with NBCUniversal, before the Ecoluxe trailers were deployed on Amazon and Universal productions, Andre Champagne sat down with The Tie In live at the Sustainable Production Forum and laid out what was possible. This is that conversation. Andre Champagne, founder and CEO of Hollywood Trucks, breaks down how autonomous power actually works on...

David Sinfield is one of the most in-demand gaffers in the world and co-founder of Green Voltage, a UK-based battery power rental company serving major film productions. In this episode, he breaks down how battery-electric systems are quietly replacing diesel generators on blockbuster sets — from filming on a frozen Norwegian lake for No Time to Die to silent night shoots at sea in Jamaica to powe...

PGA Sustainability Task Force co-chair and Emmy-winning producer Lydia Dean Pilcher shares why setting clear sustainability goals at the start of a production is the only way to make them stick — and what that looks like in practice. Lydia co-developed the PGA's newly released Sustainability Tool Kit for Producers with Mari Jo Winkler and Clara George, also featured in this Best Of series. Essenti...

Mari Jo Winkler has been greening film productions since 2003. As executive producer of HBO's True Detective: Night Country, she made a decision that cut the show's carbon footprint by 2–3x: shoot in Iceland instead of Alaska — not just for the landscape, but for the geothermal grid. In this excerpt from the NAB Excellence in Sustainability Awards, Mari Jo walks through exactly how she did it: sco...

Clara George has spent over 30 years in film and television — moving from line producer to unit production manager and producer on US and Canadian productions — and she co-wrote the production sections of the PGA's newly released Sustainability Tool Kit for Producers. In this episode, she breaks down the concept she calls holistic budgeting: why the argument that sustainability costs more is almos...

A single AI query uses four to five times the energy of a regular search. Data centers consumed 415 terawatt hours of electricity in 2024 — and that number is projected to more than double by 2030. But the carbon story most people aren't talking about isn't the electricity. It's the equipment. Kanika Arora Sharma, Principal of Sustainability at Introba, led the research report Hidden Emissions of...

What does it actually take to get content from a camera to your screen — and how much energy does it burn along the way? Barbara Lange, founder of Kibo 121 and co-founder of the Media Tech Sustainability Series, breaks down the four stages of media tech — production, digital factory, distribution, and consumption — and why the industry needs to stop quietly doing good work and start talking about...

Andre Champagne, founder and CEO of Hollywood Trucks, just announced a multi-year deal with NBCUniversal to deploy his new Eco Luxe trailers across all their film and TV productions — on-lot and off-lot. In this episode, he joins us from inside one of his new Eco Luxe trailers — parked on the Universal Studios lot, running entirely on its own power, never plugged in. He breaks down how autonomous...