Cruise Ship Diaries Part 4

I joined the Coral in August 2007 and within the first month I’d began to adapt to my surroundings namely a much larger alcohol intake and surviving on 2-3 hours sleep a night was the new normal, work was picking up and I was getting more confident with my editing and things were going well.

I was a staff member and that meant I had deck privileges which although varied ship to ship, were essentially the same. I could eat in the passenger buffet at certain times of day, make use of the ships facilities if they were not in use or quiet and even throw on the suit and tie and go out for a meal at the ships speciality Italian & Steakhouse restaurants on a night off if they had space.

Then there was the crew bar, buried deep and low on deck 5 or 6 forward with incredibly low ceilings (as they apparently forgot to build in the Coral's original plans) and it was divided into the smoking and non-smoking sections, the only real difference was that you could hear yourself talk and the bar was in the non-smoking section. As a staff member you have a shipboard account and you are given a 5 digit number, so you can write your drinks order on a chit (blank piece of paper) hand it in at the bar and thats how you pay, you then get your bar bill around the same time as your pay and it was not unheard of for some crew to spend more in the more than they made in wages!

There was also ‘cambusa’ a once a cruise bulk alcohol sale from the stockrooms where you could buy a few crates of beer, 2 bottles of spirits and soft drinks / water for personal use only in your cabin each cruise. What made it ridiculous was the price of alcohol back in 2007 it was $1.50 for a beer & $2 for a spirit/mixer, everyone bought everyone a drink because they were so cheap and there was always a mad rush to the bar after 11pm when most crew finished work. The bar would usually close around 1a.m but everyone would stack their drinks so you could be sat ten drinks deep by midnight, or just sneak a bottle from your cabin down.

My first ship birthday was fast approaching and the team took my out for dinner at the steakhouse and then it was down to the bar for ‘disco’ night. ‘Disco’ night was the main crew party each cruise, usually with a DJ playing terrible eastern European dance music at a spectacularly loud volume. So combine a visit to the steakhouse, a ‘disco’ night and my birthday and it was one to try to remember! The team arranged a cake for me which was brought down to the bar - Exhibit A

In hindsight this was a mistake as this then happened.

We were thrown out of the bar and someone took the remains of the cake up to our deck 9 corridor trailing chocolate cake all the way through passenger areas. After continuing the drinking in the corridor somewhere the rest of the cake vanished, we thought no more of it and called it a night. As this was 2007 if it was deemed you needed one you were given a pager so people could contact you, the next morning Rich paged me to tell me we had a meeting with the first purser who was our bosses boss. Apparently we had created a bit of a scene in the crew bar the night before which had been noticed by the wrong people and henceforth the photo department was banned from getting birthday cakes on the Coral Princess! He had pictures of all the cake spread through the corridor of the passenger area of deck 9 and then the remnants of the cake had been thrown into another crew area all over the door of the ships printer.

As Rich was my supervisor he got an official warning and but as I was new I only got a verbal warning, but warned that I was still in my trial period and the company could send me home at any point if I misbehaved again.

The way disciplinary action takes place onboard is that depending on the seriousness of the offence it can be either verbal warning (which you still receive written confirmation of!) or a written warning. Three written warnings in one contract and you are sent home, or if you really mess up, you’ll have a meeting with the captain and its’ a flip of the coin if the captain decides you stay or go home. In the old days you could be fired from a ship and / or any ship that captain is on and after some time off you could be brought back to another ship and given a second chance.

The most common reason someone is fired is because they were drunk and make a scene in a public area in front of the guests and officially you could be breathalysed at any time but if you refuse the breathalyser you usually would be sent home anyway. The legal limit on Princess was about the equivalent of two beers! But thats crazy, surely everyone drank more than that you may ask and you would be right. There were many shades of grey when it came to drinking onboard, it was generally accepted that the crew would drink more than the legal limit and on your first day on most ships the Captain would give a speech about knowing your limits, the implicit implication being - know when to stop and call it a night. Make sure it doesn’t interfere with your job and never appear drunk in front of the guests (which I think is actually the opposite for entertainment staff) No one really ever got breathalysed unless they’d got on the wrong persons radar or had someone who didn’t like them in a position of power but combine the two and you could be in trouble. The other common reason for getting in trouble was being late or missing a full crew drill where once a cruise we’d stage a mock evacuation of the an area of the ship to make sure we all knew what we were doing in an emergency.

I knew I’d shortly be working with a different senior videog as Rich was coming towards the end of the contract and only had a cruise or so left until the office extended his contract. That was something I maybe missed in the small print that the office could extend or shorten your contract by a month with little notice, and if I remember rightly Rich was not too happy about having more time put on his contract. Later that week we had a full crew drill which Rich missed, he was breathalysed, made to stay in his cabin and then they sent him home from Juneau, Alaska the next day. I think Rich was unlucky but because of the birthday cake incident a week or so earlier that had put us on the radar of the wrong people on board and then missing the drill compounded that, add in he and the department manager didn't get on and that was it.

The team were shocked and it suddenly dawned on me that I was in deep shit as although Rich had brought me up to speed on my shooting and editing there was a hell of a lot I still didn’t know how to do. The manger sat me down and said could I complete the DVD by myself, taking into account it was the seniors job to master and quality check the final DVD and make sure all the menus worked. I can’t remember if I said yes or not, but they didn’t really have any option!

The next few days were a blur of covering two peoples worth of shoots and edits and spending every waking hour making sure I could actually produce a DVD at the end of the cruise. I had a call with the video bosses in LA who tried to reassure me I could do it and everything would be fine but I had my doubts, mainly because of the short window of time I had to get the final DVD completed. On most ships you can make your final DVD after your last event or last port of call and then spend that night burning all the copies you’ve pre-sold so they are ready for the guests to collect on the last (usually a sea day) of the cruise. The last event I had to film was the Champagne Waterfall party on the second formal night, this was an issue as the event didn’t start till around 11pm, finished around 12.30am and all the copies of the DVD had to be ready to hand out to the guests at 9a.m giving me a very small margin of error. We had also pre-sold around 200 DVD’s that cruise which needed burning that night with 2 and a half working DVD burning machines that could produce 15 DVD’s every 15 minutes or so depending on how much video was on them.

Once the party had finished I hightailed it to the video room and set the footage to capture into the computer, the dark old days of DV Cam tape the capture was real time so the approximately 30 minutes of footage I shot would take that long to get into the system. I rushed back to my cabin showered (as running around filming people in a tux is horrifically sweaty work), rushed to the crew bar for some vodka and red bull, snuck my drinks to the video room and got to work.

It was a fairly simple edit, some people dancing, people pouring champagne and posing and the maitre’d throwing champagne everywhere as you can see below.

The old school photogs will remember that this version of Champagne Waterfall was always on the last formal night at usually with a ridiculous 11p.m start time and the entertainment staff would have to get everyone up and dancing, sometimes there was a balloon drop, sometimes not.

By the time I'd finished it was around 2a.m and I’d triple checked the DVD actually worked and hit export and nothing happened! Then the spinning wheel of death and the Mac crashed! I may have then sworn quite creatively and thrown some stuff around the video room, my mind was racing thinking ‘shit, when did I last autosave the project and how many hours will this cost me? I was lucky, once I rebooted the program it had autosaved right where it had crashed, I hit export once again and it started exporting the final DVD, however it also said it was going to take two and a half hours to do that before I could start making the copies! Time to hit the crew bar again where some of the inebriated photog’s said ‘why are you still in uniform?’, ‘cos I’m still working!’ Worse than that I’d just missed last orders at the bar, thankfully the photog table was full of drinks still and someone handed me a beer.

Around 3a.m some of the photogs snuck back to the video room to help me out with the DVD burning which was really appreciated as it had been a formal night as well which is always the longest day of the cruise for the photogs but as I was now flying solo they could see I was working my arse off. When we got back to the video room the DVD had burned and I quickly had to check and click on every menu and button and make sure they connected to the right video, thankfully they did. The main worry was over I had completed the final DVD and everything worked now I could relax a little but we still had to burn over 200 DVD’s before 9am. Burning DVD’s is like working in a factory, you sit on the floor surrounded by stacks of blank DVD’s, sticky labels with the DVD’s date on them and cases to put them in and the you box them the second they are out of the burning towers. As I was shattered and more than 5 drinks into the evening at this point I needed to wake myself up by blaring some Rage Against The Machine from the editing computer and having a little mosh around the video room to keep myself awake.

It was already light outside by the time I finished around 6a.m, I took the boxes of the DVD’s with the list of people who had ordered the DVD, went to the mess for breakfast and then slept for a whole 2 hours. Despite being absolutely knackered I was ecstatic as I’d managed to not cock the whole thing up and I think I gained the respect of the team by them seeing how hard I worked that cruise to make sure the DVD was finished on time.

Your DVD sales onboard depend on a lot of factors that as a videographer you actually have no control over and one of the key ones is do the photographers like you and are they pushing the DVD to the passengers onboard and if the answer is no, then you can have the best video ever but you’ll be dead in the water. We had gone well over our video sales target with me as the only videog for half the cruise and I think the team pushed it more because they saw the hours I was pulling and crucially they helped me out throughout the cruise whenever they could so they probably felt more invested in the DVD doing well.

I also might have been a victim of my own success as a few days earlier I’d been told that a replacement for Rich would be coming onboard in Vancouver at the start of the next cruise which was now a day away, then the manager informed me unfortunately they now couldn’t get anyone for 2-3 weeks and I’d be by myself for that time but head office was very impressed with how I copied and thought I could handle it. Great, I thought. The last few days had almost killed me and now I was looking at 2-3 weeks more of it. I always wonder if I’d completely screwed it all up if they would have sent someone when they said to Vancouver but by actually doing a decent job they held off?

In Part 5 - A new senior, a new roommate and a new itinerary!