The Horror of Crew Waves, Paper Plane Challenge & Other Onboard Events During The World Cruise

No phrase strikes more fear into the heart of any videographer than 'can you shoot a new crew waves video?' They were the band of our existance, I thankfully didn't shoot the one above, but its the only example I have of the sheer torture filming one of them is.

Firstly we spent all day filming the passengers dancing and waving and now we had to film the crew doing the same, then the video never went on the DVD we were selling anyway as it would almost always be out of date within a cruise with the high turnover of crew. This also meant it was not an official photo department job but usually a request from the entertainment department, cruise director and first purser. These were heads of departments you didn't want to piss off therefore despite being a revenue based position from time to time we had to film for other departments.

Crew Waves is a massive pain in the arse as initially no one wants to take part in it and you lose days onboard trying to co-ordinate departments just to get one shot with them, then there is always one of them doing something stupid that means a re-take. Sometimes you are lucky enough to get someone from the cruise staff co-ordinating for you but then that means you could be sat having lunch or chilling in your cabin then your pager goes off and you have to grab the camera and rush to get one shot. Then when you get there you have to wait an hour for one person to turn up!!!!

Then the next agony in the process is when a department you've already filmed asks to be re-shot as their department head has changed, which only happens beacause the bloody thing takes so many weeks to shoot. When you finally have the finished video it gets played for a few minutes once on the end of that cruises morning show and I'll explain the morning show in a later blog.

The issue is you don't want to piss off the cruise director as they have no qualms about telling the entertainent staff to not mention the DVD at all and a good relationship can be massively beneficial to sales. At the start of the world cruise we had a new CD onboard an older American lady called Sammy who was pleasent enough and I never had any issues with, the only issue covering shipboard events on a world cruise is you quickly begin to run out events to film.

This lack of activties really began to show when a scheduled event for paying guests was fucking Paper Plane Challenge! It is exactly what you think and fortunately the video I have will not upload, but yes one of your afternoons activities was indeed making paper aeroplanes and throwing them into the pool! It is right up there with one of the worst events I've ever had to film and the video only ran about 1 min 30 seconds because I didn't want that shit taking up any port segment space on the DVD's

This meant that the usual events would be repeated so after Country & Western Night once we hit Alaska we had Country Night 2: Klondike Night which was exactly the same event and was a massive case of deja vu. Where on the Coral we had Dancing Through The Decades it was split into 3 events on the Sun.

I lost track of how many Champagne Waterfall parties we had and the one below bizarrely had snow inside in the middle of July!!!

I'd guess that probably 80% of the PAX got on in Sydney and got back off again 3 months later, but from a technical standpoint the cruise was split into 3 distinct legs where PAX could come on and off for any of the indivdual legs but as a whole despite the cruise staffs best efforts there really wasn't much to do on the long amounts of sea days!

Finally one of my favourite events to shoot was Peer Factor which I've mentioned in previous blogs, but there was so many moving parts to making the show work that it involved a big effort from multiple departments to pull off well and then it all depended on how good the participants were and if there was any crowd to get behind the event. Unfortunately from a revenue point of view we were still in the age of put the people in it to buy it, and at most you would have 10 people taking part in the event. Then usually they were also all related of if we got really lucky they'd all be members of the same family meaning at best they'd buy 1 DVd between the 10 of them.

One of the contradictory factors is that usually the Aussies are the best group of PAX to have onboard as they love the events and a good crowd with willing particpiants will really put an event over the top, the biggest compliment I could get was someone would walk past a TV, see an event I'd filmed and say 'oh that looked like fun, we should have gone to that!' Sometimes yes they were great events other times they were terrible events with next to no audience and most of the video would be the cruise staff mugging for the camera and filling time for me.

On the next cruise diaries - Back to Alaska and a night out in Canada!