Need More Power

Eventually we had things working, just barely, on occasion.  Both the power and the phones would cut out at least once a week.  But we were moved in, and work was getting done.  I was still building out the facility over the next few months.  We ended up bringing Ben back during that time, a year after his rough summer, and he helped me with a lot of the installation work.  I bought lots of new gear during that time, primarily from eBay and NewEgg deals.  I figure that I was buying enough gear and finding enough good deals to save the company an average of a thousand bucks a day for six months.  Once we got it all setup, I could control everything from my desk, operating the systems and routing them to any room, and send their video output to any screen in the facility.

About a month in, I was starting a screening in our new theater for the president of IMAX, and the moment I hit play, the power went out.  The room was dark, so no one else even knew right away, just expecting the picture to start any moment.  My workstation was on battery, but the projector, speakers, and lights were all off.  I had to go open the door just to give them enough light to get outside.  It was not the proudest moment for my bosses.  There was also a large event planned to take place at the office that night, a script reading like the one in Argo.  So we checked the circuit breakers all the way up the system, and everything was still on.  It eventually took the power company eight hours to restore the electrical service to our feed.  It was technically back on before the event, but in the meantime, unable to risk it not being repaired in time, we had rented a generator, and gotten it all hooked up.

That prompted us to look into a more permanent generator solution.  We eventually got a large generator, which we ran every day, allowing us to use all of our equipment at once, which had not been possible with the construction power.  And then every night as work was winding down, we would shut it off, and using a system I designed, switch the whole building onto the construction power for the night, with a large physical transfer switch.  So the power would go out for about two seconds, twice a day, which rebooted any systems not on battery backups, and reeked havoc on our UPS systems in the long term, but we were able to keep everything going.  Having more power available also allowed us to install an air conditioning system in the edit rooms.  We hadn’t had anything like that until then.

It was about this time that the post side of the facility got another nickname, the Millennium Falcon.  “She may not look like much, but she's the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.”  We were using cutting edge technology, held together with duck tape and twist ties, but every once in a while it would just fail to start.  At which point Scott would come out of his edit room, imitate a Star Wars sound effect, and cry out, “Mayday, the Falcon has crashed.”  My boss even had Bandito Post Team t-shirts made, with the Millennium Falcon silhouetted in the background.