By Aram Atkinson — how a stalled film career, a screenplay, and a carbon report I couldn't actually fill in ended up as the app you can sign up to today.
Commercial freelance filmmaking went quiet in a week. The shoots I'd been booking for years vanished overnight. Crews were sent home. Studios locked their doors. I was suddenly home with a lot of time to think about what I'd actually been spending all those years making.
I went back to college. Not film school — science, and British Sign Language alongside it. The world had been telling stories I hadn't been listening to.
A TV pilot. A deaf astronomer who could read radiation in the sky long before anyone else heard the warning. It won Filmarket Hub's 2021 Best English-Language TV Pilot Screenplay — the first time something I'd written had landed somewhere outside my own laptop.
Set against UK seagrass meadows — the carbon sinks nobody films. The BFI funded it, suddenly there was a budget, a crew, a shoot date. And a brief I'd written for myself, the first time I'd ever held myself to it: make this one sustainably.
Before Green Grass rolled, I went deep. Volunteering with environmental charities on weekends, online seminars at all hours, reading research from groups who measure carbon for a living, not for a press release. It changed how I thought about a "sustainable production." Sustainability isn't a tab in a report. It lives in who you hire, who you listen to, who you read, and how much time you give the answer to be honest.
For the BAFTA Albert report I needed to know what was on, when, for how long, on which day, on which generator, with what fuel. Nobody knew. Nobody could know — there was no-one whose job it was to track it, and no-one with the time.
Latitude Footprint started as a tool for my own short film and grew into the app you can sign up to today. Hit the dot when a light goes on, hit it again when it goes off. The session timer ticks. Every kWh, every kg of CO2e, every shoot day — logged as it happens, not pieced back together at midnight three weeks after the truck went home.
Free to start. No credit card. Built by someone who's filed the report from a kitchen table at 1am and never wants you to have to.
Open Latitude Footprint