“Other films have done a great job of showing us the problem. We wanted ‘Deep Green’ to be about solutions. The best way to stop man-made global warming, at every level, is to find out who and what is the best at fixing it all over the world, and then share it. And that’s what we did for two and a half years in nine countries.”

– Matthew Briggs, “Deep Green” director

Filmmaker Matthew Briggs’ intense interest in man-made global warming began long before “Deep Green” was conceived. Since 1981, when he helped pioneer the wild mushroom industry in the U.S., Briggs has spent much of his time roaming the national forests between the Rockies and Pacific Ocean in search of elusive fresh fungi. By the 1990s, he says, the encroachment effects of climate change was undeniable.

As Briggs relates in “Deep Green”: “Warmer winters allowed bark beetles to survive, explode in numbers, and overwhelm the trees. Early snow-melt has left mountain forests drier. All over the West you see dead trees and explosive forest fires. What was a natural cycle of destruction and then renewal has been short-circuited by man-made global warming, and is now mostly destruction. Climate change stepped into my life.” Determined to do something about it, Briggs attended a Bioneers conference in 1999. “When I went to that first one, I thought I knew a bunch, and I didn’t know much at all. There were so many great speakers. The demonstrations of how everything and everyone was connected. That we’re all downwind and downstream. The full truth of how the natural biological world balanced itself, and how the size of the human footprint was throwing it out of balance in so many places, in so many ways. And that this was all fixable.”

He subsequently became active in politics. While working with the members of one national campaign in 2005, Briggs lamented that the candidate didn’t know enough about environmental issues. So he offered to write a summary of the latest information that could help make good policy.

“I figured it would take a couple of weeks to draft,” he recounts with a laugh. “It stretched to over a year.” One book led to another, and before he knew it, he had read a mind-boggling 400 or so tomes, thousands of articles, and attended over two dozen conferences. “There were times when every square foot of my house was covered in stacks of books and paper. I mean, the coal section alone had 25 sub-categories in it and renewable energy had 40.”

Looking back, Briggs says, “It scared me to death. It’s unbelievable. All the trends are horrendous, and it’s not just technology that’s going to fix it, and it’s not just policy. It’s a combination of policy, lifestyle change, technology, and the way you restore the natural world so nature works for you.”

At home, Briggs set out to reduce his own carbon footprint. He moth-balled his SUV for a high mileage hybrid car, and gave his mid-century home the first of three major energy-efficient makeovers. He upgraded the furnace and all of the household appliances, changed the light bulbs, and installed insulation and roof-top solar panels. His electric bill dropped 70%, supplemented by 30% of power from PGE’s GreenSource program.

When word of his efforts to lower his carbon footprint reached the organizers of a Portland-area green home tour, Briggs’ house became one of those featured. That publicity led to a visit by a local film crew for Al Gore’s upcoming “Live Earth” concert event. On the day of the broadcast, April 22, 2007, Briggs happened to tune into the 32 original animated shorts on global warming commissioned for the occasion. Watching them, he had an epiphany.

“I thought, what a fantastic teaching tool. I decided to make a short film about what one person can do to live lighter on the planet. It started as a weekend shoot.

Briggs consulted his brother, a veteran actor living in Los Angeles, who in turn put him in touch with a friend, University of California Film School Professor Jeff Lengyel, the producer and director of three highly-praised History Channel documentaries.

Lengyel advised the first-time director to recruit the best professional talent he could afford. Briggs would ultimately assemble an award-winning crew that featured an international team of world-class cinematographers. He began by recruiting Carey Weatherford, a former CBS News cameraman who had won both the Peabody and Dupont Columbia Awards for his work on shows like “60 Minutes,” and Gene Herring, who had produced and shot over three hundred national television programs and more than fifty instructional videos. Briggs would later add the Emmy-winning former National Geographic shooter Jeff Streich, Brett Wood, and Andrew Clark in China.

“’Deep Green’ started as a small, weekend shoot that stretched to a week. I thought it would be $10,000 or $20,000. Then the idea expanded to a green building TV special. So we went to Green Build Chicago, which is the gathering of the tribes of anybody who does green building. We shot the green building tour of houses in Portland. We shot lots of different builders here who are pretty talented and famous. Then several were invited to go to China to teach them how to do this. So I thought, gee, we should go and film that.”

As fate would have it, Briggs and his crew could not get their visas in time. “So I hired a crew from the only foreign licensed media company in China—AsiaWorks Television in Beijing— to shoot it,” Briggs continues. “It was then that Andrew Clark, their bureau chief and a brilliant cinematographer entered the picture.” Clark – who would ultimately head up principal photography in both China and Europe – had travelled the world shooting breaking news stories for National Geographic, the BBC, CNN, and others.

When “Deep Green” began principal photography in July 2007, “many of the solutions had not been discovered and they were found while we were shooting the movie. The science and the literature caught up. This was a six year project and the science got stronger and the solutions got better. Now we know that much of global warming is man-caused, and we know how to fix it,” says Briggs.

Filming moved to China, where Briggs and two film crews spent a full month conducting interviews and touring facilities—many of which had never been shot before. It became clear that this was now a much bigger project, this could now be a movie about how to de-carbonize energy and best restore the natural world to stop man-made climate heating.

“If you’re going to make a film about environmental solutions, you’ve got to go to China. The old saw is: ‘So goes China, so goes the world’ as far as the environment. What we found is even with all these people consuming all this stuff, there are people working on solutions in just as big a way, and that’s the surprise. Most of the things we were talking about over here in the States – green building, energy efficiency, electrification of transportation, mass transit, cleaning up of coal plants, shutting down of old dirty coal plants, recycling water – they were already doing.” The new saw is: ‘So goes China and the United States, so goes global warming.’ Comparing and challenging both China and the United States to restorative action became central to “Deep Green.”

Following Briggs’ departure, Andrew Clark continued to shoot new developments in the country’s emerging green movement over another five months. Back in the states, Briggs and a crew travelled to more than a dozen green hotspots in the U.S. for interviews and behind-the-scenes tours of breakthrough technologies. About the same time, Clark led a film crew through Europe for six weeks.

“Deep Green” was filmed almost entirely with the digital Sony 900R HD camera system – which can deliver the look and depth of field of 35mm film when shot at a speed of 24p. “Andrew used a matte box and various filters for more depth of field and customized all the camera settings. He basically established the ‘look’ of ‘Deep Green’ so that every shot would be framed and feel like a painting,” Briggs explains.

“We wanted the highest quality we could get. This camera is the descendent of the one used by George Lucas on ‘Star Wars’ Episodes II and III. It is a stunning piece of equipment,” says DP Carey Weatherford.

Illuminating Animations from the Creative Geniuses at Bent Image Lab

From the beginning, Briggs imagined a way of inspiring a new generation of green achievers through the universal appeal of animation. He also knew that he needed places in the movie for people to breathe. On the recommendation of his friend, animator Jeffrey Bost, he chose the famed Bent Image Lab, which specializes in wildly creative spots and videos that range from the frenetic to the deeply moving. Since its formation in 2002, Bent has developed a world class reputation for its exquisite mastery of stop-motion, mixed-media animation, mesmerizing storytelling, visual effects, CG character animation, motion graphics, and live-action production.

Within “Deep Green,” viewers encounter eight humorous vignettes featuring the signature line-drawing style of Pascal Campion on such topics as power-sipping lights, how to kill vampire energy suckers, fixing leaky houses, low carbon transport, energy efficiency, and our diet.

Chel White, who was one of the 32 creators of short films for “Live Earth,” contributed the technically difficult “Earth Faces” to “Deep Green.” Known for his pictures of the human experience, “Earth Faces” has an ethereal-like quality that is intricate, sublime, and beautiful.

Two additional animations – “Trees” and “The Krill is Gone” – became so strong that Briggs now plans on showing them as free-standing pieces before the documentary to set the stage.

“Deep Green” features an original music score by jazz pianist and composer Randy Porter. The bands REM and Phish also donated music for the project.

Often asked what the title of the film means, Briggs explains: “Scientists today almost all agree that we high carbon emitters have to lower our carbon footprints by 80% – 90% in a short period of time. That’s like 9 out of 10 things you’d have to find some other way of doing, without burning carbon. That’s a lot of changing. That’s pretty deep. So we call it “Deep Green.”