Cruise Ship Diaries Part 6

Each cruise Heather would make our schedule from the ships F&E (Food & Beverage), this document would list all the days of the cruise and she would circle what events she thought or we would be required to film. As a senior videographer you can generally pick what you film in conjunction with the photo manager and entertainment departments, as a junior videographer you just get told what to film, though generally with a good senior you’ll rotate the events so that you don’t film the same events every cruise. Also the schedule has to take into account how long the port day filming will be as well, if you are going to be up at 7a.m and get back to the ship around 7p.m then you will need time to eat, shower and power nap before editing the footage you’ve just filmed that day. This also means if you’ve been on the long excursion you shouldn’t be filming the onboard events that evening, although as you'll see later this does happen!

In this part I’ll be looking at some of the onboard events we would film on the Coral and first up would be -

Sailaway Party

With a sailaway video the most important thing for me was to always turn it around as quickly as possible so that the guests would immediately see themselves on TV that night (if it was a port the next day) or the next morning if it was a sea day. They were always fairly simple edits as you’d get some technical shots of the ship pulling away and show the general architecture of the ship, then pick up anyone waving from the shore as the ship pulled away. If you were lucky you'd have an indentifiable landmark that sells the iconicness of the trip, like passing under the bridge in the clip from Vancouver above.

If I remember rightly we would double shoot this sometimes with one person concentrating on the scenics and the other person filming the entertainment staff dancing with the passengers, we’d then blend all the footage together into one edit.

Florida was a decent sailaway as you usually had some other Princess ships around you could film (for that brand synergy) but it was quick and you could miss it. Every cruise before the ship sets sail we have to do a full passenger drill where we explain to them what to do in an emergency and its a requirement of maritime law, despite none of the guests wanting to be there or paying attention most of the time. One the drill is finished it would always be a mad dash back to the cabin to change uniform and grab the camera and tripod sand and then figure out is is quicker to risk waiting for a packed lift or run up 10 flights of stairs to the top deck?

It was also about being seen by the guests and letting them know who you were and what you did onboard, there would usually be some kind of prize draw by the entertainment staff and our Reflections DVD would be one of the prizes and we’d get introduced to the crowd at the event ‘don’t worry he’s not an over ambitious passenger thats Neil one of our Reflections videographers’.

The first sea day could usually be fairly busy with 3+ events sometimes, firstly we’d encourage everyone to start drinking around midday with a martini demo in the atrium. Cruise staff and bar staff would make drinks and get the passengers up to dance and shake a martini, it was a simple edit and by now I’d improved a fair bit from my terrible early ones. My most hated event was next - Junior Chef! A horrific kids event where at most 9 or 10 kids would go to the gallery and make a cake with one of the chefs and the event never worked for a multitude of reasons. At the time the whole point of the DVD was to get as many guests on it as possible so was it worth covering an event with about 10 people max?, this was compounded by how long the event took to complete and the fact that most of the kids were related to each other and had their parents there, filming the event themselves and generally being horrific parents at the same time. ‘No Johnny, put the icing on that way! Let me show you!!!’ Some of the kids looked miserable as fuck there and it always seemed to be the parents who were more interested in it than anyone of us. Thankfully the event was discontinued fairly soon afterwards and I’m fairly certain in the modern day you wouldn't be able to film someones kids and put them on the ships TV and on a DVD without many kinds of waivers and permissions.

Then to round off the day (and ususally 3rd uniform change) would be the Captains Welcome Party, this would later be amalgated to the more well known Champagne Waterfall event but back in 2007 the event would be canapes and free $2 glasses of champagne being handed out while the string quartet played. Then the Captain would do his usual introducing of the officers and welcome aboard speech, however what Heather made me do which I absolutely hated was go up to people and interview them about what they were looking forward to on the cruise. It's only looing back on these terrible videos right now that I can see I would also repeat back their answer on camera myself!!!

There was always a 'healthy' debate amongst videogs about the onboard events and the general view at the time was that we didn't like having to film them and would much rather be out in port filming all the time, but at the time they were a neccesary evil. As a 1st contact junior despite some event rotation each cruise you would end up with the worst events! The whole ethos of video within Princess at the time was 'get as many people as possible on the video, and they'll buy it'.

What really helped sales sometimes was us being visible at the events and promotion from the cruise staff (entertainment staff) and cruise director, some cruise directors would promote our DVD regulary throughout the cruise and other wouldn't mention it at all. As many videogs openly hated the events there would sometimes be tension between us and the cruise staff, why should they promote us if we are not going to make an effort? They were the entertainment department, photo/video was a revenue department so our primary focuses were different.

Geting motivated to shoot good event edits came about completely by accident due to the Coral having an insane uniform code for the photo department. In the mornings it was blue polo shirt / black trousers, if you had to film outside it was white polo shirt / shorts and after 5pm each night we had to wear a casual suit with a horrific princess branded tie! See evidence below!

Now I had a fair few evening shoots for theme night events such as Country & Western & 50s Rock N' Roll night coming each cruise and the cruise staff and many of the guests would dress accordingly but then there was the guy running around in a suit sweating profusely however I had a cunning plan!

I suggested that despite it being a rule, would it not make more sense for me to dress like everyone else and be more part of the event? I was told 'no, you just don't want to wear your uniform'. Absolutely I didn't want to wear the fucking suit especially when filming a theme night meant running around all over the place for the over an hour, whatever I was wearing I would be drenched at the end of every event! Despite initially being told no, I may have mentioned it to the cruise director (who remember also supported the same football team as me) and despite him not being my boss, suddenly I was allowed to dress like everyone else on a theme night, which explains the below picture!

I have a slight musical background from playing guitar for years and that extends to editing quite a bit as you learn early on to cut on the beat of the song and body movement and doing that makes your edits more dynamic, however it also takes more time as you'll need more footage to cut between and you need to find the right piece of music for it all to work. One of the best compliments I could get from the event videos were when guests would watch them on the Photo gallery TV's and say 'well, that looked fun we should have gone to that!'

In Part 7 - Country Night, Dancing Through The Decades, Deck Party's & Peer Factor