Green Filming

An extra 5 % for sustainable productions.

Three questions decide whether it adds up for you: what it pays, what it costs, and how binding the commitment is.

Lighting, vehicles, power, catering — that is where the footprint of a shoot sits.

5%on top of the base incentive.

2023in force since 1 January.

2026the revised criteria catalogue V2_2026 applies.

2022certified since October, among the first in Austria.

What does the green bonus pay?

A production that meets the criteria receives an additional 5 % of its Austrian spend, on top of whichever base incentive it is using. Since 1 January 2023.

How the base incentive works — the rates, the caps, the minimum spend, which programmes combine and which do not — is a separate subject, and it is on our Production Services page. This page is about the other half: what you actually have to do to earn those 5 %, and what happens if you commit and then cannot deliver.

Will you get the bonus? Three questions first

Is a base incentive running? The green bonus does not stand on its own. It sits on top of a base incentive — without one there is no bonus.
Is a certified consultant on board? Either a certified green filming consultant or a green certified company. One of the two is a requirement, not a recommendation.
Can your production hold the mandatory criteria even when things change? That is the real question. What goes into the Check goes into the contract.

What does a green filming consultant cost?

The consultant is not a cost you have to absorb. The calculation templates of the funding bodies contain separate budget lines for the green filming consultant, and those lines are themselves eligible for funding. It is a funded position, not an overhead.

For your budget that means: the line exists, but it does not weigh on you. It sits in the template, it is co-funded, and it is one of the few places in a cost plan where additional work costs nothing additional.

The decisions are the real price. Power supply, vehicles, lighting, catering and waste are where the footprint of a shoot sits, and all four are cheaper to decide in prep than to change in week three. A production that brings the question up after the schedule is locked will usually find that the 5 % has already been spent on workarounds.

How binding is the commitment?

The part rarely written about — and the one that decides whether the bonus is paid.

The Green Filming Check is not a form you fill in at the end. It is an integral part of the funding application and of the funding contract itself. You use it in advance to test whether your production can meet the required number of mandatory criteria — and once you submit it, those criteria are contractually binding.

At the end comes the mandatory Final Green Report, which sets the actual state of the Green Filming Check against what you committed to. A certified consultant writes it. That report decides whether the bonus is paid.

What goes into the Check goes into the contract. Commit only to what the production can hold under changed conditions.
The one rule

Locations change, some mountains leave you a generator and nothing else, shoots move into November. The safe route is unglamorous: run the Green Filming Check early, with someone who has done it before, and enter what the production can hold.

When does the bonus not pay off?

Three cases, and we would rather say so on the first call than in the Final Green Report.

The schedule is already locked. Power, vehicles, lighting and catering are decided by then. Changing them afterwards usually costs more than the 5 % brings in.
The production cannot reliably hold the mandatory criteria. A bonus applied for and then missed is more expensive than one never applied for — the criteria you committed to are in the contract.
There is no base incentive. The green bonus sits on top of one. Without it there is nothing for it to sit on.

What changed on 1 January 2026?

The criteria catalogue was revised. Version V2_2026 applies to all funded productions from 1 January 2026. If your last Austrian shoot was in 2024, the rules you worked to are not the rules you will be measured against.

The Austrian Film Institute developed the catalogue together with EVERGREEN PRISMA, the competence centre for green filming, and the Association of Green Film Consultants Austria — on the basis of the Austrian Ecolabel UZ 76 and modelled on the German ecological standards for cinema, television and VoD productions.

That last point matters for international productions: Austria and Germany deliberately harmonised their requirements. A production already working to German standards is not starting from scratch here.

The revision strengthened three things in particular: the involvement of the service trades, the communication of the measures taken, and timely documentation.

What does a green filming consultant do?

The advice happens in prep, not in the report afterwards.

A green filming consultant is a trained professional who advises and guides a production in adopting sustainable practices and reducing its environmental impact.

Consultants are involved at every stage, from pre-production through to post. They advise all trades, work out environmentally sound alternatives together with the producer and the other parties involved, and point out further possibilities. They audit the production itself and prepare the report that goes to the funding institutions.

The role is decisive for recognition, because the consultant’s report determines whether the subsidies it triggers are awarded at all.

Who certifies in Austria?

The two certificates

Two are currently awarded: one according to ÖNORM EN ISO/IEC 17024 at the WIFI, and the certificate of the Lower Austrian Film Commission, which operates under the label Evergreen Prisma.

For the bonus, your production needs one of two things: a certified green filming consultant, or a green certified company. The payment stands or falls on it — which is why it belongs on the checklist when you choose a service producer.

In house at RitzlFilm

Wolfgang Ritzberger is a certified green filming consultant, certified by the Lower Austrian Film Commission under Evergreen Prisma in October 2022, among the first to hold the qualification in Austria. And he teaches the subject: a lectureship at the USTP – University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Department of Media and Digital Technologies, Media Technology degree programme, for the subject Sustainability in Film- and Media-Production.

That matters for a practical reason rather than a decorative one. The criteria catalogue is revised — most recently for 2026 — and someone who teaches the field has to keep current with it whether a production is running or not. You are not relying on a certificate issued once.

Did you know

Green filming starts with one Californian study.

Between the summer of 2003 and the spring of 2005, the UCLA Institute of the Environment examined what film and television production actually does to the environment, under contract to the California Integrated Waste Management Board. The report appeared in 2006 and is regarded as the first detailed work on the subject; it compared the industry’s footprint in the Los Angeles area with that of other industries based there.

It was explicitly not written as an indictment but as a guide — collecting the practices that already worked inside the industry. The authors’ finding was a sober one: on environmental matters the industry is simultaneously very progressive and very conservative. Among the letters of support in the appendix is one from the then governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Everything that stands in a criteria catalogue today goes back to that collection.

Charles Corbett, Richard Turco: Sustainability in the Motion Picture Industry. UCLA Institute of the Environment for the California Integrated Waste Management Board, 2006.

What does it look like in practice?

In Austria, The Forgiven was among the productions recognised as a GreenFilming project, reducing single-use plastics, running a waste management system that separated materials, and drawing on renewable energy.

Elsewhere the practice has become routine. What the following productions have in common is less inspiring than it sounds: almost all of it comes down to lighting, vehicles, power supply and catering waste. That is where the footprint of a shoot sits — and it is also where the savings are.

Jurassic World: Dominion Electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel-cell generators on set; a waste reduction programme diverted more than 12 t from landfill.
Chernobyl Energy-efficient LED lighting and composting of food waste.
The Revenant Remote locations, hybrid vehicles, reusable water bottles, composting of organic waste.
The White Crow Electric cars and bicycles for cast and crew, solar generators on set.
Little Women LED lighting and a biodiesel generator.
Dark Waters LED lighting and a waste programme that recycled over 70 % of set waste.
The Guilty Renewable energy, no plastic bottles, systematic waste separation.
Ozark LED lighting, hybrid vehicles, composting.
The Walking Dead Energy-efficient lighting and food waste composting across the series.
Avengers: Endgame LED lighting and a waste programme that recycled more than 10 t of plastic and cardboard.

If you are coming from Korea

Korea started from the same document as Austria — the UCLA study named in the box above. In October 2020 the Korean Film Council published a research report, Environmental Guidelines for Sustainable Film Production, and among the foreign systems it surveys is that study. Its stated reason for existing is blunt: despite the environmental impact of film production, Korea had no law, no system, no guideline, no regulation and no prior research on the subject.

Its long-term recommendations included a green film fund and the introduction of a green film certification system. Those are the two things Austria already has: a criteria catalogue built on the Austrian Ecolabel UZ 76, certified consultants, and the five per cent.

For a Korean production the practical consequence is simple. You do not have to build a procedure. The criteria exist, the consultant is certified, the bonus can go into the budget — for the Austrian part of your spend, today.

Why is it worth doing anyway?

Film production has a measurable environmental footprint, and sustainable practice reduces it. That is the reason the funding bodies created the incentive in the first place.

But the argument that actually convinces a production office is a duller one: most of the measures cost less than the alternative once they are planned rather than improvised. LED lighting draws less power — and it is not only that smaller generators will do: even larger units can run on batteries, without cable, without a generator. Fewer unit moves means fewer vehicles. Separated waste on a large set is cheaper to dispose of than mixed waste. The 5 % is the incentive. The savings are the reason it works.

Run the Check before the schedule is locked.

Subject, shooting window and locations are enough for a first assessment of what your production can hold.

Get your project assessed

Figures and programmes without warranty. Guidelines change — please verify the current terms for your project before you budget on them.