Cruise Ship Diaries Part 1

Prologue

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 the cruise industry has been hit very hard, with at the time of writing this many crew still stuck on ships having not set foot on land for over 2 months. Trying to repatriate the crews worldwide has become a logistical nightmare for the schedulers as seemingly many countries will not let the crew disembark because of COVID-19 fear.

I worked for Princess Cruises for seven years and and they were some of the best experiences of my life, every contract was different within the same company for a litany of reasons. Where you were cruising depended on if you made any commission, did you get on with your manager, your team and roommate? Every itinerary had its pros and cons as did every contract, the highs on certain days were immeasurable from scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef, to climbing the Great Wall of China, visiting Angor Wat in Cambodia and getting to walk across the Panama Canal. The lows could be working yourself to burnout for little pay, not getting along with the people you worked with / shared a cabin with and missing friends and family back home or ‘the real world’ as we called it in our cruise ship bubble.

While I‘ve been furloughed from my job and stuck at home, I was looking through my old hard drives of photos and videos and decided to add some more context to the images while I still remember those days to give myself a written recollection of those days and to hopefully provide some entertaining insight on the ups and downs of life at sea.

Part 1

At 27 I was still living my parents working part time in a pub and trying to get freelance camera jobs wherever I could. I’d barely travelled because I simply couldn’t afford it and didn’t want to spend another year struggling for work and money and I applied for two jobs. One was for a home shopping channel based in Birmingham, the other was for Princess Cruises with an interview down in Southampton.

There was four of us going and they hadn’t told us if there was one job or four going so everyone immediately eyed each other with suspicion. Only one of us was not wearing a suit so I felt fairly confident this Swedish typical looking film student was out of the running unless he had an amazing showreel. The first thing we had to do was fill in a questionnaire to do with shutter speeds and F-stops, and at that point having never used a DSLR I felt fully out of my depth and thought ‘shit, I’m not getting this job’.

I think I answered about half of the questions as it became apparent there was a massive gap in my technical knowledge, although the Swede had finished early and looked supremely confident while the rest of us looked crestfallen. Next we were shown some corporate PR videos about the company that seemed to go on for hours and then finally it was lunchtime, but there was still no escape. With our platter of sandwiches in front of us we were shown an example of the type of videos we would be making ‘Princess Reflections DVD’s’, with the interviewer herself taking a break outside while we watched all four of us immediately began taking the videos apart.

Essentially we were watching lots of overweight Americans dancing and waving at the camera, from shipboard events like country and western night & 50’s rock n roll sock hop to the shore excursions where once again the focus was on the passengers and not the places they were at. The interviewer walked back in the room and asked us all what we thought and everyone lied ‘oh they are great’, ‘they really make cruising look fun’ and the Swede bullshitting with ‘the production values look so high’ until they got to me.

After the disaster of the questionnaire I didn’t feel like I was even in the running so I was honest but constructively so. I mentioned how there seemed to be no brand uniformity between the videos, how they all seemed a bit samey and it would be nice to see more of the places rather than the people. I took issues with the titles and fonts used, transitions used, level of music, no live dialogue while the other candidates looked at me like I had lost my mind.

There was a brief but what seemed long silence when I was finished ‘well, your certainly have a lot of opinions’ she said. I did not take that as an encouraging sign from her tone and the fact that it had already been a long day and we still had the one on one interviews to go. My interview was last and of course the Swede was before me, he walked out looking like he already the job with his DVD showreel in hand, ‘what did they think of your showreel?’ I asked and there the Swedes cool demeanour broke ‘I forgot to show it to them’ he gasped with true horror in his voice as he realised his mistake. I feigned a concerned ‘oh’ and headed in.

Thankfully most of the questions were not of a technical nature and more about sussing out if I would go crazy trapped in prison cell sized room with no windows with someone I didn’t know for 6 months at a time. Now was the time to lie, so I embellished stories about filming my friends band on tour and sleeping with 5 on the floor of smelly freezing transit van, ‘having a bed would be an improvement on that’ I joked. Of course that never happened but I had to sell them on that I would not go crazy onboard.

‘Well Neil, I think thats all we need’ she said and I almost made the same mistake as the Swede ‘Oh, but don’t you want a quick look at my show reel?’ She clearly didn’t due to the time of day but I guess as I had made the effort and remembered I had one I got a chance.

To this day I’m fairly certain what got me the job was a video I did for Mcdonald’s while I was working there, there was a regional internal competition between the UK restaurants so see who could do the best community outreach. My manager told me that they had certain funds put aside for this event and training each year so but usually most of the managers just spent it on a night out while they stood there and said a few lines about what they did in their community. My manager wanted to win it and actually do a good job that year but he found the cost of hiring a professional videographer for the day way too expensive, I interjected ‘I do film about college and can edit at home’.

We struck a deal where he bought my first tripod for me, I got several shifts off work paid so I could edit and got paid on top of that for my first professional shoot/edit job. I produced two five minute videos that would bookend his speech, the first was cross cut interviews with members of the local council, editor of the local newspaper etc about how good McDonalds was in the community. Then there was a montage of a group of school kids wearing McDonalds shirts cleaning up a local park cut to ‘The Wombles’ theme tune. The video was a success and my manger won the regional and national award for the competition, but crucially I think the video showed Princess that I could do their current montage style of activities set to music but I could also produce good interview work which in years to come was where the company was headed.

After the longest job interview of my life I headed home still with no idea if I was in the running for the job or not, it was only a few weeks later when I got a phone call from Southampton telling me I would be having a second more technical interview with the head of Princess video from Los Angeles over the phone. I can’t remember much about that interview but it was another few weeks before I was told I had the job and to go the American Embassy in London to get my Visa which turned into a massively eventful day.

Coming up in Part 2 - Embassy Woes, Off to San Francisco...no its changed to Alaska, and hello Coral Princess!