An Edmonton video production company is reeling after a thief broke into its workspace over the long weekend and stole equipment and gear worth thousands of dollars.
Caleb Ford, owner of Old Saw Storytelling, has been renting an office in a co-working space in the Alberta Block building on Jasper Avenue and 105 Street for the last couple months. The company specializes in producing online video content.
Ford said he and partner Dan Zimmerman spent last week cramming four shoots into six days; the pair wanted to streamline their workload before Ford’s wedding.
“Throughout the week, each night, we backup our footage onto a hard drive, wipe the cards, back it up on a second hard drive,” Ford said.
The pair left the hard drives at the office over the long weekend, then got a call Monday morning with some bad news.
“The office has been broken into. Driving here, we said, ‘Hey, if the equipment is gone, we can rebuild. We can slowly acquire everything back, that’s okay. Let’s hope the hard drives are there.’”
But when the pair arrived, all their hard drives, which contain not only the projects from last week but all the projects Ford has ever worked on, were gone.
“All this work you’ve put in can be so quickly gone and you feel fragile. You put all this labour in and you plan… and in a moment, you can forget to bring something home and it’ll all be gone,” Ford said.
Ford estimates $8,000 worth of equipment and work was stolen from the office. The pair, who do not have insurance on their gear, plans to re-shoot all their projects.
Video surveillance from the building shows a man entering the building, then leaving through the alley carrying gear from Old Saw Storytelling.
“To see that footage, it’s a funny feeling. This is real. Our stuff is right there,” Ford said.
Partner Dan Zimmerman said the theft is the worst-case scenario.
“I think if we saw [the thief], we would probably just ask for the footage back. Just the hard drives. That’s our main priority for sure,” he said.
He is still grappling with the loss.
“The first immediate though is, you’re just trying to figure out the head space of someone who would do that and just try to have some sort of empathy. That was honestly our first reaction: ‘Why did someone do this?’”
Zimmerman said there have been lessons learned from this incident, including the importance of keeping hard drives in different physical locations.
He and Ford have also been stunned by the community response to their plight. A GoFundMe page has raised several thousand dollars for the pair to re-purchase gear and re-shoot their projects.
David Botwick-Ries, the community manager for the co-working space, called Homestead Coworking, said there are 10 offices on the floor. He said seven are occupied and three were broken into, with Old Saw Storytelling faring the worst.
“Security on Jasper Avenue is an ongoing issue. These things will happen. We’re taking the appropriate measures and steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again,” he said.
Botwick-Ries said it appears the thief picked locks to gain access to the building and then to the office, then jammed the doors of the private offices to get in.
Botwick-Ries said access to stairwells will be upgraded to require monitored key card access and an internal camera system will be installed on the floor to complement surveillance systems in the lobby and back alley.
Edmonton police spokesperson Cheryl Sheppard said EPS is investigating a break and enter at the address and are in the process of obtaining surveillance video. No suspects have been identified.
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