Bend Film Festival - Volunteer Training

 

To be a volunteer for the Bend Film Festival, you are required to attend the Volunteer Training and to sign up for two shifts.  I didn’t really have any preference where I signed up, so I tried to choose a shift that might be hard to fill.  I guessed that early in the morning (9am) wouldn’t be too popular and I didn’t think the Cascade Theater would be very popular.  So I signed up for Friday and Saturday mornings at the Cascade Theater.  Barbara and I have been to several plays there and we have fond memories of the site.

The volunteer training was fairly uneventful.  A couple of points stood out.  Taylor Swift’s new movie is opening at Regal Theaters on the same weekend as the Bend Film Festival.  They are expecting it to be a zoo there.  The Bend Film Festival usually has 2 or more lines outside the theater.  Who knows how many lines they will have for the Taylor Swift film.  Plus, they expect the parking to be difficult.

The second note from the volunteer training was that volunteers could watch the movies after they had checked everyone in.  This is assuming that there are empty seats available.  We were assured that almost all shows do not sell out.  Hmm, maybe I should have taken that into account when selecting my shifts.  I hadn’t even looked at the movies being shown during my shifts.  It would have been better to pick a shift with movies I wanted to see.  However I am notoriously bad at selecting movies from just the short blurb given in the Festival guide.

Several days after the training, we got an urgent message from the Volunteer Coordinator.  They desperately needed volunteers at Regal Theaters!  Not a big surprise to me.  In all fairness, if they knew that the Regal Theaters were going to be a zoo, they needed to warn the volunteers.  Maybe they should have offered some type of bonus to anyone who took one of these shifts.  They also needed volunteers at the Cascades Theater on Sunday afternoon.  I picked up one of those shifts.  Hopefully, the Venue Manager will not have to re-train me for every shift.