Blog Post 2

 

  • How were you feeling on the first day of the project? What were your initial expectations?   What were your hopes and fears?

  • Who are the people with whom you are currently working? Describe your colleagues and the organization for which you are working.  What have you learned so far about the people at your project and the expectations of your project?

On the first day, I was excited to work with film and cinema and came in anxiously interested. However, I initally struggled to find the door to even get in. The Chagrin Documentary Film Festival is based in Chagrin Falls, but their office is placed above the stores. To get into the building, you have to access a narrow door squeezed between the ground-level stores that lead to a steep staircase up to the office. When I first came in, I was met by Engelina Koberna, the Technical and Creative Director. She essentially is the main person who dictates my schedule day to day and helps me to collaborate with other members of the team. The first thing that Engelina had me start work on was helping to program one of their showings, which was planned to happen in Lake Chautauqua. The festival wants the showing to be as seamless and easy a process as possible, so they make one long video of all of the films, with breaks in between and messages. I had to download all of the files and then code them, in order, into a program called PlaybackPro. I also had to make the “hold screen” in canva. For Cdffs purposes, hold scenes are basically a palate cleanser for the audience between films, that includes the sponsors for the night, and displays qr codes prompting viewers to donate. That same day I met Sarah Willgrube, the Operations manager. She oversees the “networking” and communications between other entities in order to keep CDFFs ship sailing. I worked with her to help get onto online calendars to advertise the festival. The CDFF obviously needs to get the word out to people about the festival, so it was our job to essentially go one by one through this spreadsheet with different “Calendars” so they can advertise our festival. The thing is however, every single website had completely different requirements and questions that they asked, and since I didn't want to constantly pester my advisers with basic but hard to find questions, I spent a lot of our time finding out and “Researching” information by myself.

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