Creating Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s first 3-D movie, took a lot of imagination. But it also took a lot of processing power — one fantastic scene alone would have taken 19.5 years to render if just a single computer had been used, according to the production house that handled the bulk of the movie’s visual effects.

Intense VFX shots layered upon the already-complex 3-D production made Hugo a challenge that could only be met with brute computer strength. That strength came courtesy of Pixomondo, the VFX shop that completed some 800 shots for the film in just over a year, employing 400 artists in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Thailand and Germany.

Why were so many hands needed? Because rendering just one version of one shot of the film — the swooping view into the train station, shown at the beginning of the above clip that showcases Pixomondo’s work on Hugo — took 171,015 hours of processing time. To get it done in time for the film’s November release, they broke down each shot into jobs for 1,000 computers in five different offices.

Getting all those shots of Hugo’s 1930s Paris just right also took a lot of electricity — nearly all the juice the VFX house’s office in Burbank, California, could muster.

“We didn’t have enough electricity [to do the rendering] in one office,” Pixomondo VFX supervisor Ben Grossmann said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “We blew out two power transformers trying, and had to get the electricity company to help us install more powerful ones…. Each time we rendered the shot, it cost $35,000 in electricity alone.”

Many shots in the film needed between 20 and 100 different versions, but because this particular shot was so complex, only one complete version could be made — and it was only reviewed by the filmmakers in still frames and small sections. The completed version was delivered on the last day possible in order to make the film’s release date, according to Grossmann.

“In fact, it was presented to Marty on a laptop in the lobby of the DGA theater after his initial screenings with the Academy only a few weeks before theatrical release,” Grossman said.

Want more fun facts about Pixomodo’s work on Hugo? When building Paris on a computer, the smallest “bricks” the company used were called “polygons.” The train station totaled 35 million polygons and each train came in at 2 million polygons. The number of polygons in the entire city, Grossman said, was too large to calculate.

Check out how Pixomodo’s work came together on Hugo in the clip above and get a taste of how much processing power can go into just one film.