Starting On Construction

The new office facility was my first experience with a major construction project.  Most of the work was done by the same crew that built our film sets, which doesn’t lead to a lasting quality product.  I designed all of the circuits and wiring, and oversaw the construction over about six weeks.  The week before we were scheduled to move in, we arrived to find that the utility company had removed both of the main electrical services into the building, leaving us without a source of power.  We were told by the landlord that this was an expected part of the process, and that they needed to be replaced.  That slowed progress down, but our guys just ran extension cords from the next building to power their tools.  It was eventually discovered that the replacement process was expected to take the power company six months.  Obviously that was the wrong answer, since we were moving in a video editing facility in a week and needed electricity.  We eventually got them to install a temporary power service hookup, usually used on construction sites, which we ended up using for two years.  It was much less power than we really needed, but we tried to make do.

There was also no phone service or internet wiring going to the building.  The landlord solved this by running a regular wire across the roofs of three other building, and plugging it into the phone service at their maintenance office.  So we moved in a production company with four phone lines and a DSL connection.  We discovered the week we moved in that the plumbing in the bathrooms needed to be replaced, which involved a lot of jack-hammering and bad smells for our first week of work there.

It was at this point that the facility got the nickname the FOB, or Forward Operating Base.  We did enough work with the military, and with the army tents setup in rows, that someone pointed out we were roughing it a lot like the temporary military emplacements in foreign countries.

There was a large beam that ran right through the center of the upper floor area, about four feet off the floor, which was the source of more than one headache.  But it also was able to form the physical backbone of the network, with wires from the server rack headed through the rafters to places all over the building.  Since we were directly above the edit rooms, I placed the workstation towers on the second floor, and ran wires from them down to the monitors and peripherals in the edit rooms.  That made for a quieter environment in the edit rooms, and gave me access to work on the systems easily.  It also allowed me to route different systems into different rooms, depending on the needs of the projects we were working on.

I also built us a theater, with a workstation desk console in the back, in what I consider to be the ideal way to edit.  We contracted an outside company to install the phone system and network wiring that I designed, but I ran the fiber optic lines, as well as the audio and video cables on my own.  I had a large desk custom built upstairs for myself, and had systems setup on three sides of me, and well as a separate work area to build and repair equipment.  Workspace wise, it was the most ideal layout I have ever setup.  It is amazing what you can do with a surplus of space, and the freedom to use it.