Hartford Business Journal

6 Hartford Business Journal • May 27, 2019 • www.HartfordBusiness.com Reporter's Notebook Matt Pilon | mpilon@HartfordBusiness.com Health Care/Bioscience, Startups & Entrepreneurs, Government/Law and Energy ENTERTAINMENT Rising CT film director dives into second feature-length production W ho says actors and direc- tors have to run off to New York or Los Angeles to launch their careers? Newington native Erik Bloomquist appears to be doing pretty well right here in Connecticut, and he's only in the early stages of writing his career script. Bloomquist, 27 and principal of Main- frame Pictures LLC, wrote, created, directed and was lead actor in "Cobble- stone Corridor," a five-episode TV series shot in Hartford and Simsbury, which originally aired on CPTV in 2016. The Hartford resident and Trinity College alum won two New England Emmy Awards for his directing and writing in Cobblestone. More recently, Bloomquist has been riding the highs of his feature-film directorial debut, a 2018 psychological thriller called "Long Lost." The movie, shot entirely at a Greenwich mansion, won accolades at a number of film festivals and did a 30-city theatrical run before landing on Amazon, where it can be purchased or rented. "Long Lost" has also garnered a solid 71 percent posi- tive rating from critics on the film-review website Rotten Tomatoes. Now, Bloomquist and Mainframe (which was co-founded by Erik's broth- er, Carson Bloomquist) are jumping into their next project, another fea- ture-length film, titled "Ten Minutes to Midnight," which is about a radio host and her crew trapped overnight in the station by a hurricane. The genre is a cross between Stephen King and a modern-day "Twilight Zone." In a recent interview, Erik Bloomquist said he's got plenty of am- bitions for bigger-budget productions, and he thinks Connecticut is a good place to try to make those dreams a reality, despite the fact that the state has pared back its motion-picture tax credits over the past decade. To build prominence in the indus- try, Bloomquist said much hinges on building a good network of collabora- tors (actors and crew alike) and mak- ing well-received productions. "The thing about feature films is, no one's going to let you direct a feature film until you've already directed one," Bloomquist said. "We just want to keep demonstrating our value and ability to execute. The more we do that, the more relevant our projects become." "Cobblestone Corridor" and "Long Lost" have started to build up Main- frame's brand, he said. The aim is to further build on that with "Ten Minutes to Midnight," which will start filming in mid-June in Willimantic. "We're planning to do a festival run in early 2020 and follow a similar and hopefully more high-profile trajectory than 'Long Lost,' " Bloomquist said. Finishing a project that gets some attention from critics can help grab interest from investors who may want to help finance the next big project. One of Bloomquist's recent inves- tors is Jeffrey Fryer, chief financial officer at Farmington-based biotech startup Rallybio. Fryer, who is financ- ing 25 percent of "Ten Minutes to Midnight" (Bloomquist declined to disclose the project's overall budget), met Bloomquist after attending a screening of "Long Lost." Fryer has appeared as an extra in eight films over the past five years, including several made by Rocky Hill-based Syn- thetic Cinema. He had mutual connec- tions to Bloomquist through that work. However, the former Alexion Pharma- ceuticals tax executive said this repre- sents the first time he's investing in a film. "Having seen 'Long Lost' a couple of times now, and seeing some of the other work Erik has done, I'm ex- tremely impressed," Fryer said. Fryer said he likes that all of Main- frame's work has been shot in Con- necticut. He wants the state to be a bigger draw in general for filmmakers. Bloomquist said finding people like Fryer is key for getting projects made. "The capital is sort of what lights the fuse," Bloomquist said. "That, in many ways, is the trickiest part, as it probably is for many businesses." ENERGY & UTILITIES Electric utilities continue post-2012 reliability trend P ower outages in Connecticut have been much shorter on aver- age as well as less frequent for the past six years. The high-water mark was 2011, when two memorable storms — Tropical Storm Irene and a Halloween Nor'easter — each knocked out electricity for more than 800,000 utility customers here. This month, the Public Utilities Regulatory issued its annual reliability report for each of the public electric utilities in the state, Eversource and United Illuminating. The latest report, which covers 2017, shows that outage duration and frequen- cy remain far below their 2011 peaks, though there were some upticks between 2016 to 2017, notably for Eversource. PURA measures system reliability using two core metrics: • System average interruption dura- tion index (SAIDI) is the sum of customer interruptions in minutes divided by customers served. It can be viewed as the average outage du- ration experienced by all customers. • System average interruption frequency index (SAIFI) is the total number of customers interrupted divided by number of customers. It can be viewed as the average out- age frequency. Counting six major storms during 2017, Eversource's SAIFI reading was largely flat, but its SAIDI reading increased from 202 to 355. That's the highest it has been since 2012, the year Hurricane Sandy hit. A big part of the reason for the in- crease in power-outage duration was Tropical Storm Philippe (Oct. 29-Nov. 1, 2017), which resulted in 5.7 million hours of service outages. However, excluding major storms, Eversource's SAIDI reading dropped to its lowest (best) level since at least 1996, while its SAIFI reading was its second best since then. Meanwhile, UI's SAIDI reading also increased, when including storms, and its SAIFI reading dropped. When not including storms, UI, too, had a good year. Both readings were their lowest (best) since at least 1996. PURA said Eversource has much more territory to cover than UI — 87 percent of the state's geography vs. 7 percent for UI. Eversource also has more wooded territory and four times as many electricity customers. An Eversource crew working during a winter storm. PHOTO | HBJ FILE Erik Bloomquist looks into the camera while shooting a short called "Intermedium." PHOTO | ROSALIND O'CONNOR

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