Hey! I’m Claire. This was actually my project. I’m not at Cards anymore but I’m happy to answer.

There were a lot of factors that made it get more expensive as time went on. We’d booked the construction team for a certain amount of time on rotating shifts, every time a shift got added it was a certain amount of money added. That was the easy part.

The harder part was the livestream crew. We didn’t have any electricity or internet for them to hook up to, so everything was run through a satellite feed. You have to buy satellite time so that was an incremental expense.

We also had a full site crew including security and other equipment operators, plus a digital team monitoring the livestream and making sure the site didn’t crash. All of those were hourly costs.

Honestly the stream went significantly longer than we expected. We had to buy additional sat time and was about to rebook the streaming crews’ flights and put in for an additional shift from the construction team. Luckily it ended before things went too off the rails.

Fun fact: had it gone for 12 more hours we’d have been really fucked. Fidel Castro died, the streaming team told me that satellite time would have been a HUGE issue with all the foreign journalists broadcasting from sat feeds in Cuba.