Found our workshop
We realised early on in the project that trying to build a cycle powered cinema was going to take a fair amount of space, with our calculations as they stand, we think we’re going to need at least ten bikes to power the thing. Ten bikes on stands takes up quite a bit of room and will largely effect the final layout of our cinema, but for the sake of being able to build and test the kit, it meant we needed some room.
In Cambridge, space is quite a hard thing to come by, certainly if your budgets aren’t huge and you can’t commit to more than a couple of months rent. When you start looking about, you do find the odd warehouse here and there, due to be demolished to make way for more flats.
After asking around amongst friends and on local community websites, we found out that The Portland Arms, a local legend of a pub, has a barn out back which hasn’t been used for a while, instead just a store for all that ‘pub junk’ that builds up over the years. The deal was on, we clear it out, pay a little in rent, and it’s ours for a couple of months. It’s on, we’ve got our workshop.
The story so far…
The idea for The Magnificent Revolutionary Cycling Cinema came about in April 2007, between three people who thought they could somehow make it work. Some early purchases from ebay, borrowing a neighbour’s road bike and some basic tests seemed to prove that bike power wouldn’t be that hard to master.
Talking to others with more knowledge of such things as electronics, projectors and invertors (and there’s a lot of these people in Cambridge) and we’re fairly confident that we can make a cycle powered cinema work.
Through some nice connections the idea was proposed to The Big Chill Festival and they backed us by given us a venue for our first performance, and some seed funding, which allows us to build up the kit needed for the project.
We come into May 2007 with a good idea, useful friends, a little bit of kit, some money (promised) and no workshop to build the thing in. We haven’t even got any bikes yet.
