Tribe Trivia 4: How much paper is used in making a Tribe series – and what you can do with it

How much do you know about The Tribe?

Did you know…

The Cloud 9 production centre goes through a LOT of paper in the course of a production. Hundreds of people are involved in making each 52 x half-hour series. How much paper do they go through in a typical six-month production? Well…

1. Everyone involved in making the series gets a Call Sheet each day which shows the schedule of scenes to be filmed for that day and information like the location of each scene, likely timing, which cast should be in each scene, props, animals, et cetera. Over 150 people each day get a call sheet x six-months = over 30,000 call sheets. Each Call Sheet might average 6 pages so that uses 30,000 call sheets x 6 pages = 180,000 pages!

2. And each script is also given to everyone who makes the series (so they know what to make!) ­ and each script is usually around 60-70 pages. So 52 episodes x 60-70 pages = around 4,000 pages in total. If over 150 people each get each script, that¹s 150 people x 4,000 pages = 600,000 pages of paper! And there are different drafts of scripts too and other daily uses of paperwork.
We estimate that in the course of six-months to make a 52 episodes of the Tribe, the Cloud 9 production centre goes through at least one million sheets of paper!

3. How much is over one million sheets of A4 paper  well, it is the equivalent of around 1,000 chunky telephone directories  and if each of these was stacked on top of each other, that stack of phone books would be about 170 feet tall which is taller than Nelson¹s Column in Trafalgar Square, London!

4. One million sheets of paper would weigh about 3,000 pounds  that¹s 1.36 tonnes, as heavy as a typical family-sized car or a rhinocerous  or as much as 20 people!

5. And if you were to spread that paper on the ground sheet by sheet, then one million sheets of A4 paper would cover an area of about 120 million inches squared  which in other words would be as large as a giant square around 920 feet long on all four sides!

6. If that 920-foot x 920 foot square was a tablecloth on a giant table  and if a person might take 3 feet of space to sit at that table  then you could invite over 1200 people to a meal at that table!

7. If all that paper could be used as wrapping paper (and if you might use 3 x A4 sheets worth to wrap a book) then you could wrap over 340,000 books with that much paper!

8. One million sheets of paper is as much as is used in 25,000 daily newspapers  or 3,300 novels, each of 300 pages (and if you were going to read those novels, and if someone might read 30 pages per hour, it would take them over 33,300 hours to read that many books  which is one year and 190 days of non-stop reading. What kind of eyestrain would that result in?

9. If you had the patience (and a lot of glue or tape to stick it together) then you could use a million sheets of paper to make a pretty big paper aeroplane. With say 400,000 sheets for each wing and 200,000 sheets for the body of the plane, your paper aeroplane might have a main square body 184 feet long and wide, and each wing might be 150 feet wide and just over 900 feet long. Where would you throw it?

10. Paper (unlike money) does literally grow on trees (from trees anyway) and Cloud 9 is aware of its environmental responsibilities to try to limit the amount of usage of paper as much as possible. Recycling is very much part of day to day activity in the company and all used scripts and paper is sent off to be recycled. A fully computerised/digital office-space also cuts back on the amount of paper (as many files can be read on screen/disk without being printed). We should all do what we can to reduce waste as much as possible  don¹t waste paper  and save a tree today!