What a crazy experience I've had over the past week. Everything that we have worked towards came down to this one week.
All week was spent organising and managing all the 15 volunteers we had come into the office from Monday through to Saturday.
Whilst doing this, I also was also contacting and updating the staffing sheet for both Future Music and Good Life Festival.
To get the staff, we put out gumtree ads, which over 500 people looked at and hundreds responded to. I needed to make sure every division of the Festival had the right amount of volunteers and that everyone would be able to get to work done. I read resume after resume assigning them to the right and most suited role to their abilities.With working the whole week, there were also exciting perks, such as getting the chance to look at and help prepare each individual international artist riders. This is what they requested to have in their green rooms and what drinks and food they wanted. I also got to see the set times, which is all exciting when you're working backstage at your first festival.
At Future Music Festival I was local artist Liaison. I arrived at 7am, getting to the backstage of the Cocoon tent. I arrived to find there was no spot for me to sign on the artists so I had to quickly organise with the event managers to get 2 tables and a marque. After setting up my area, I waited for my artists to arrive. I was hoping they would sign in with me with a maximum of ten minutes before they are meant to be on stage. Lots of the starting acts didn't sign in with me, leaving me in crisis mode as many of them needed an Artist pass to get on stage as their local ones wouldn't allow it. This meant I was having to run around the arena trying to find them all in time. Luckily, everyone was where I told them to be so that when the gates opened, they could start playing. When I got back to my sign on desk, just to be sure that this wouldn't happen again; I messaged everyone telling them to come sign in with me as soon as they came to the arena which should be at a minimum an hour before their set start time. I would then send a reminder text to the artists ten minutes before their set, that they should be at their stage ready to take over from the artist before them. From then on , everything went extremely smoothly and the day ran completely according to plan.
Being the local artist liaison for Future, I had to create my own run sheet. This ran extremely smoothly on the day. I had made a run sheet that would allow me to know when they arrived, when they had to head to stage, where they were playing and what time their set started and finished. I also had a column for if they had handed in their APRA forms, invoices and if they had collected or had their dedicated rider.
At GoodLife, I had a much more involved role. I was the Meet and Greet Co-ordinator, this meant I was backstage where the Artist Sign on was for the International Artists. Being the Meet and Greet Co-ordinator, I had to go pick up all artists either from stage or the artist commune area and take them to the VIP Ultimate Meet and Greet Area. The Artists only had a maximum of 20 minutes to take photographs with fans. The lesser known artists were easy to manage, but when it came to artists like Timmy Trumpet and Will Sparkers, there were hundreds of people wanting photographers. Here I would have to manage the crowd, telling them to make friends as no one would be able to get a photograph alone nor can they take 'selfies.' This was an extremely fun role as it tested my time, crowd and crisis management.
We also had a few international stars we had to manage. These stars would go to a meet and greet where they would be there for an hour or so as an even larger crowd would be waiting.
