The picturesque Yorkshire Dales are perhaps not the first place that most people think of when it comes to locations of high tech production houses. But for Tom and Emily Dalton, the directors of Factual Fiction, the remote site was perfect for what they hoped to achieve.
Formed six years ago, the company’s launch coincided with the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and its concomitant lockdowns. As a result, the Daltons never actually worked from the office they initially planned to occupy. However, the situation forced a new way of thinking. At the time, businesses around the country had to urgently explore new ways of working. With offices closing up and down the land, a new normal began to emerge with remote and hybrid models quickly coming to the fore. Explaining the sink-or-swim reality facing the fledgling company at the time, Tom Dalton says, “We were left with a very practical problem: everything that we did had to happen where we lived.”
The pandemic caused the cancellation of two of the initial three commissions they had started with, but there was still one remaining. “We had a show to make, and we had to make it work,” says Tom.
Formerly the MD at a London-based company owned by Endemol (now under the Banijay umbrella), Emily explains the decision to set up the company in Yorkshire was in part informed by Channel 4’s move to Leeds, and a wider push to expand production beyond its historic M25 base. Added impetus came from the couple’s determination to operate a more sustainable company. “We wanted to tell people stories in an environmentally friendly way,” says Emily. The benefits were stacking up and, having lived in Yorkshire before, both relished the opportunity to make shows in an area they knew well.
Notwithstanding the pandemic, there were numerous practical challenges to be overcome, with the need for services and a reliable source of power being particularly pressing. “[There are] a lot of energy demands as a production company, particularly if you do post work, which we’ve always done,” Tom continues. “We had no services, we had no gas, we had no water, we had no main sewage. You have to build all of these things yourself. We had problems to solve, and so we just started building capacity to solve those problems. We have a notoriously unreliable power supply. In the first year of living here, I think we had seven power cuts, one of which lasted three days.”
“We had to find ways to work with people that don’t rely on conventional means,” says Emily, who acknowledges that most UK production companies gravitate towards cities and urban areas, often because they are centres of population. “That’s where the people are. So we found a solution, originally through necessity, now through choice, setting up the systems that allow us to work remotely.”
Driving change
Establishing a power source came first, as Emily explains, “If you’re uploading rushes and it takes 12 hours to do it, you don’t want a power failure in the middle of the night. Tom is extremely technically minded, which perhaps not a lot of producers are, [and did] a lot of research into the different bits of software required and methods to upload media. He built in a lot of redundancy, but beyond that, I don’t think it needed a lot of hardware or upfront investment.”
“We just started building capacity,” says Tom, making the installation of a robust alternative energy solution sound like a simple task. Wind generation was quickly ruled out as impractical, meaning solar was the route of choice, despite the obvious geographical limitations. An array comprising 18 solar panels was built, with attention then turning to storing the energy.
“We put in the solar, then started building up our battery capacity, because we quickly realised that that was key. [We needed] a big enough battery that allowed us to ride out the notoriously poor North Yorkshire sunshine.”
The battery solution, which Tom describes as “very large”, is in itself an ingenious design utilising 126 recycled units from Nissan Leaf electric cars to feed a 16Kw Deye Inverter, which is managed using Solar Assistant and a JK-BMS. Here, the company provides an elegant demonstration that business goals can exist in harmony with sustainability. While recognising cost is a primary driver in any business, the ethos driving Factual Fiction is bringing very real financial benefits.
“We are a little bit different in so far as a lot of what we do is fed by sustainability ideas,” says Tom. “We didn’t go out and spend £80,000 on a 100 kw/h battery. We built it out of recycled modules. We’re taking something that’s already there and reusing it in a very productive way but the cost difference is incredibly significant. Our entire battery solar set up cost about £15,000 and it paid for itself very, very quickly.”
This kind of can-do mentality has been instrumental in why Factual Fiction is able to call itself the first completely off-grid production company in the UK. “We’re prepared to get stuck in and get our hands dirty and figure out these things for ourselves, as opposed to paying someone else.”
Emily agrees, “We just get on and do stuff. Small things that most people had to do through Covid, but not many have kept up. We still do regular production meetings but rather than having to force everyone to get in the car and drive to the office or to our base, we replaced all physical meetings with Zoom.”
The concept was put to the test in 2023, when Factual Fiction was commissioned to work on The Greatest Show Never Made for Amazon Prime. It passed with flying colours. The company was able to run the production from its base, also handling “a good portion of the post work.”
It is very evident that Emily and Tom are driven by a shared ethos and a desire to take positive action. Although they are aware of environmental concerns being expressed throughout the industry, the Daltons are determined to do things their own way. They have recently replanted six and a half hectares of land with trees, repurposing an area of scrubland and replacing trees damaged in recent storms. “We’re not doing it through Carbon Credits or certification schemes or for any PR value,” says Emily. “We just thought, OK, what can we do? Well, there’s this bit of land – let’s plant some trees.”
Working in an industry which necessitates high energy consumption, Emily offers an explanation as to how this can be reconciled with the need to meet environmental targets. “We were granted protected worker status during the pandemic. It was a complete surprise and we didn’t capitalise on it but [it made us realise that] people do see TV as a necessary thing.” This supports conversations taking place in the wider industry about the importance of broadcast and its relevance in the Critical National Infrastructure space. She goes on to stress the importance of mitigation, which is at the heart of what Factual Fiction is trying to achieve.
“There are practical things that everyone can do,” says Tom. “And I think what we are trying to do is present an alternative to the tick box approach. This is what we’re doing – and it’s quite specific to our circumstances, of course – but is there some little bit of what we are doing that is relevant to you, and is that something you could do?
“Some of the best conversations we have are with people who are genuinely enthused by what we’ve done and want to understand how they can implement some of these things. Once they understand we always carefully consider the bottom line – we’re not just ignoring the need to support our business – they see that these things can coexist. It leads to somebody doing something.“
A sunny outlook
Looking to the future, the company is only too aware of the increasing demands placed on energy use by the expanding use of technologies such as AI and cloud computing. Factual Fiction is already working to ensure these innovations do not compromise its ethos.
The company has just set up a post production facility, The Sun House, in France’s Lot Valley. As with the Yorkshire operation, it is entirely off-grid.In December, The Sun House delivered Channel 4’s three-part A very British Christmas, its first show for a UK broadcaster. The site benefits from substantially higher broadband performance than that available at home. “It’s beautiful countryside, middle of nowhere, and the broadband speed we get there is eight times the speed that we can get in central London,” says Tom, “and all of the post production technology is housed there.”
“We have five offline editing machines (Mac Studios) that run Avid, all of which are networked to a central server running about 80TB of solid-state drives, allowing us to edit natively in 4K. We grade in Resolve on a PC, with an eye on moving to Baselight if we can find the time to retrain. Small VFX jobs are handled by After Effects, whilst sound is done in Pro Tools and mixed on a Dolby Atmos Genelec setup. All work is done remotely using Parsec, with a mixture of our own tools and off-the-shelf software (such as Blip) for media transfer and management. Our broadband link is 8Gbps up and down.”
Given its location, the solar capacity in France is greater, with around a hundred kilowatts available and the potential to increase to a megawatt if needed. Aware of the often hidden environmental costs of cloud computing, Factual Fiction is taking steps that appear opposite to the prevailing industry wisdom, shifting away from cloud computing, with the new facility able to provide all the capacity needed.
They are taking a similarly enlightened approach to their use of AI. “We’ve started, obviously, like everyone else, having to do a lot of work in the AI sphere, and particularly generative AI, which is incredibly power hungry,” says Tom. “As soon as you start doing it, you watch it create your six or seven second clip, and you see how much power it’s sucking up. It’s shocking. So we’ve been doing our own internal experiments, running these models locally, as opposed to through the cloud. And we have started producing content.”
In the near future, all of their AI activities will be done locally, which may very well set a precedent for the industry to follow. “I feel like the question of cloud computing is a really important one, because it’s really timely,” Tom says. “We haven’t talked about this with anyone before. It’s very new.”
Concluding, he returns to the subject of budgets, maintaining a firm belief that what is good for the environment will ultimately be good for the bottom line. “[At the moment] it may be 10 or 20 per cent more expensive than if we went the conventional route. But we’ll do it because we want to hit our sustainability targets. The cost to our clients is already equal if not less. And by doing it ourselves, we’ll be able to drive these costs down a lot more.”
- This article originally appeared in the March issue of TVBEurope, available to download here.
