Cucalorus

Cucalorus was awesome. It was a fantastic experience to attend a festival of its size in an all-access capacity in my own town. I was fortunate enough to have a pretty free schedule and spent most of my week downtown at festival events. I really enjoyed the attitudes and professional behavior of the Cucalorus staff. Most of the folks we interacted with were volunteers, as most of their staff are volunteers or seasonal employees. Everyone was very friendly, very willing to help you enjoy your festival experience. They also worked seamlessly with the staff of the different venues that festival events occupied. The employees of different theaters and bars all seemed to know at least the basics of what was going on with the festival and were mostly able to answer questions. Visions takes place over a single day and mostly in one specific location, so this doesn’t quite apply to us in the exact same fashion, but something we should definitely strive for is open communication between departments and a basic understanding of all events, schedules, and locations among all festival staff. I really enjoyed the Filmmakers Lounge, it was a good time. We don’t really have enough time in our festival for the filmmakers to make good use of a dedicated lounge, but it might be worth looking into the creation of a lounge for the filmmakers and sponsors only, for networking purposes and to provide guests who can’t really go home if they get tired or need to take a break with a place to go chill out. Another lesson we can take from the filmmakers lounge centers around booze. I learned, through my thorough investigation of the complimentary bars of cucalorus, that stocking can be an issue. at several points throughout the festival, they ran out of stuff. I spoke with someone who was in charge of stocking the liquor that they were giving out for free, and they said that the festival hadn’t bought as much as she thought they should have, and that the festival had to send someone to buy more liquor on the third day of the festival.