I became one of BAFTA Albert’s first sustainability trainers in 2015. Those were in-person sessions, a full day with rooms full of production teams, proper time and space to engage. And one exercise always landed.

We split the room in two. One group built a future and told a story with images where we’d tackled climate change. The other built a future where we hadn’t. The “business as usual” timeline was always chilling – not because it was extreme, but because it was believable. It was already happening.

Then the second group would present. Action. Intervention. Change. And the moment: what’s the difference between these two futures? The room would get it. Not because we’d told them. Because they’d worked it out themselves.

What made that work wasn’t the content. It was the engagement. It was participatory, in-person, and it gave people the space to reach their own conclusions.

Most sustainability training today looks nothing like that. It’s online. Ninety minutes of a PowerPoint presentation. Generic content covering transport, catering, circular economy, waste – designed for everyone, which means it’s tailored for no one. A costume supervisor and a lighting gaffer face completely different sustainability challenges on a production. Generic content often feels tangential to both of them, and when training feels irrelevant, people disengage. You get compliance, not commitment.

There is also a structural problem with who actually receives it. Freelance crew are either on a production – in which case they’re not available – or between jobs and not being paid. They’re not attending optional unpaid training on their days off. What tends to happen is that production management – who have dedicated time in their prep schedules – are the ones who make it to sessions. The result is that the people making day-to-day decisions on the ground, in departments, are often not in the room.

At Picture Zero, we work embedded inside productions – alongside teams, across departments, in the reality of time pressure and budget constraints. We don’t arrive with a slide deck and tell people what to do. We work with HODs and crew to find solutions that work within their specific workflows. We hold their hands as they try something for the first time. And we watch what happens.

What happens is that it sticks.

We are now working with some of the same crew across their second and third productions. The practices they tried on the first job – generator decisions, logistics choices, material substitutions – are no longer things they need support with. They’ve become instinctive. Crew carry them to their next production without being asked. That is exactly the escalation of actions Dr De Meyer describes: try something, see it works, repeat, internalise. Habits form. Culture shifts.

That kind of change doesn’t come from a training session. It comes from doing.

Picture Zero delivers training as well as embedded support, and I want to be clear about that. BAFTA Albert certification requires that at least one senior production person and one senior editorial person on each production undertake approved sustainability training – and our training now counts towards that certification.

But the way we deliver it is different. We make it production-specific: a session for a scripted drama covers scripted drama, not documentary or reality television. We condense it to an hour. We connect it directly to the challenges of that specific production. The engagement is significantly higher – because the content is relevant.

That distinction matters. The problem is not training itself. The problem is generic online training, delivered in isolation from real practice, that asks people to absorb content and then apply it on their own – weeks later, under pressure – when the moment that matters finally arrives.