Blog Post 3

 My week is continuing to be fruitful, even if it is getting a tad lonely at times. I am mostly working independently, and while I do not necessarily dislike it, I feel that I thrive best in collaborative spaces. Today, a construction builder came over to scout out the building, which was a great opportunity for me to get a mini tour of the premises. I got to see the basement with all of the storage and the blueprints for the building they plan to renovate directly below them, which they plan to do to have both the downstairs/next door public building and their upstairs/next door office. I did get the cool job of being a film screener for their pool of applicants. Obviously, I will not be the only person to review each documentary, but they need input to parse through the 600 applicants they get every year. I was really surprised at the insanely high quality of these submissions. Because CDFF can only select about 80-90 documentaries, they are very selective in quality. One of my favorite ones is a film about an old Kurdish man who is a carpenter who tries to make artificial legs out of wood for people who have lost limbs from landmines. Today, I actually got to get some fresh air, and I spent a lot of time handing out these save-the-date cards that Engelina had given to me. There are many densely populated shops in Chagrin Falls, and they have a culture of holding save-the-date cards for you that they pass out to customers. I spent my time following a map I printed out, handing out cards to businesses and just people I passed on the street. Thankfully it was a beautiful day, and I could move around. I only got one no out of about 35 stores (Chase banks), so I had a pretty good conversion rate. At the end of the week, Engelina and Sarah took me to a meeting with their main venue, the Chagrin Valley Little Theater. We got to tour the venue, and then I got to sit in on a meeting that the representatives of the Little Theater had with Sarah and Engelina about how they wanted their contract to go this year and reflected on how it went last year. This was cool because it was the closest thing to what I picture as “formal business”. I loved to see the polite but pointed discussion between the two parties, as they both tried to get a little bit of an edge in the agreement but also worked collaboratively.