Screening Green
April 1, 2008
One car, however, is giving the EcoManiacal gang fits—the Ferrari. "I’ll admit, it makes me a bit nervous," Underhill says with a grin. "I mean, what can we possibly do to improve on what’s here?" And what’s left unsaid is: Do you really want to mess up a gleaming Scaglietti?
But that’s an issue for another day. Currently, Underhill and his staff are busy knocking on doors in cable-TV land, with a few well-known parties interested in perhaps taking the shows—whose first episodes EcoManiacal is actively filming—to viewers in Europe and Australia, with success there helping break open checkbooks and programming schedules Stateside.
In the meantime, Underhill has contingency plans. He’s avidly pushing his green facility as an eco-friendly alternative for production companies looking to film their shows without harming the environment. The sales pitch is straightforward; everything in sight has a green backstory.
The lack of desktop computers? "We only use laptops, which take up less space and energy," says Caldwell. The absence of printers? "We don’t use paper much, relying mainly on e-mailed attachments," he says. The conspicuously limited numbers of TV monitors? "We’ve set up each flat-screen to split off into four images, to make more efficient use of each screen."
And the list goes on. The company doesn’t shoot with video, but rather records everything in a high-definition digital format. The film is then immediately edited on Mac computers. Most of the studio’s lights are LED-based and powered by a biodiesel generator. It will soon be replaced by a $2 million rooftop solar-panel project that promises to power not just this space, but the planned studio next door, while still returning some power to the city’s grid. The turntable-like soundstage—where cars will undergo their green metamorphosis—was built by the same people responsible for the American Idol stage and was hued mainly from recycled steel and aluminum versus wood.
"We want this studio to be a prototype for similar ones we’ll run in New York and other big cities," says Caldwell. "This could be big."
Another similarly sized plan is Underhill’s automotive dream. Dubbed the U1, it’s a vision with Tucker-like audacity—an electric four-door sedan that would boast zero-emissions and a complex engine consisting of a 20,000-rpm jet turbine fueled by hydrogen.
"It’ll be done by March," says Underhill. Which sounds rather incredible, given that a mere few months doesn’t seem like much time to create a groundbreaking sedan that at present exists only as a demonic sketch (picture a Porsche Panamera mated to a Bugatti Veyron) and taped out dimensions on a concrete pad (Underhill says his U1 will be sized like a low-slung Bentley Continental and retail for $160,000). "My goal will be to drive it from L.A. to New York without refueling in any way, and back again," he says.
advertisement
