I was filming.
This was a research project I did with a friend when I was a sophomore in college, so it was from a few years ago. We made an algae bioreactor out of 2L coke bottles, sterilized them with alcohol, then put in sterile salt water growth media and inoculated with some nanochloropsis we got as a sample from a marine bio lab.
We had it on a light cycle and always aerating through a series of tubes we hooked up to sterile pipettes, capped with sterile cotton plugs.
Once the growth was dense enough, we tried to figure out how to best filter the algae, and read that NaOH caused aggregation of the cells. We tried that and it worked, made the clumps easier to filter.
After we recovered our algae, we macerated it in liquid nitrogen and sand and did a sohxlet extraction on it.
I will put together that footage now, it's kind of scattered and old but it was a neat proof of concept. A lot of work for not a lot of oil in the end, but was a good learning experience.