Greetings from Doral, FL!

[No picture due to death of Camera #1 Dec. 2006 - April 2008]

I'm on dry land for a few days to decompress and to get ready for my West Coast swing before heading to Italy. The title of this entry is self-explanatory: these past few weeks have looked like monkeys humping a football. The problem working for large corporations is that one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing half the time... this company is no exception. Before I signed onto the Victory, I was told I was going to be onboard until May to complete work on two shows and to be trained on all of the ship's audio systems... easy, right? WRONG!!!

From day one I was behind the eight ball; I arrived two weeks after the Technical Director (TD), which means I didn't have a chance to mark my territory. There are three main elements to our shows: sound, lights, and video, and we all fight over who's most important... the correct answer would be sound (hehehe... no seriously, I'm the most important). Unfortunately, since I was late to the party I got treated like bastard step child: lighting got 5 hours a night for three weeks in the lounge, I got 4 hours... total... for the entire three weeks! Even the video guys had more time. No problem, I would just simply wait for the lighting, video, and the TD (also a lighting guy) to leave to complete my tasks, after all, I had until May, right? Wrong again!

Here's a crash course on the two operations on the ship: You have the ship operation which is run by the “Italian Navy” (surely you've all heard of them? No? That's OK; I'll talk about them later). Then you have the hotel operation, the Hotel Director (HD) and his staff runs this. He's the real captain of the ship, after all, the ship is a floating hotel; if you aren't involved in making the ship go, the HD is your boss. He decides who comes aboard the ship, for how long, and where they stay since there is limited space. Got it so far? Apparently I had issues with HD and didn't know it, and they started the moment I signed on. Remember my fun-filled first day on board? Crew management had made a clerical error that had me misclassified as part of the permanent ship staff instead of the office staff... the ramifications would not clear until weeks later.

Soon after my last blog entry, I got an email that there would be a new tech joining the crew. Since the crew was missing a tech, this came as good news, there is supposed to be five techs onboard: an audio tech, a lighting tech, a backstage tech, a back lounge tech, and an automation/scenery tech. The Victory did not have a lighting tech, so the back lounge tech had to fill that roll, and I was helping out where I could. Hopes were dashed five minutes later when the HD denied the new the light tech permission to board the ship. In his response, the HD explained there were already five techs onboard, so there weren't enough beds available. To which we all responded "who's the fifth tech?" He said I was, which touched off three days on non-stop e-mails between the HD, Cruise Director (the head of the onboard entertainment department), the office, the audio tech, and myself trying to clarify my status onboard the ship... until the TD chimed in. The TD explained that I was office staff and that I was with his crew, and I was leaving the same weekend he was... WTF?! This was bad as I still had two weeks of work left. Soon after the TD dropped his little bomb, I get a phone call from my boss back in the office asking how much time I needed. I told him at minimum I needed another two weeks, and even that would be pushing it. He calls the ship again to relay this information to the HD, but the HD wouldn't allow it, I had to get off the ship. Finally with everyone going over my head and around my own authority, I had to pull rank and explain the situation from my point of view with an email CC'd to everyone involved. It basically said that I would respect the HD wishes and leave the ship, however there would be no backups of the show (since it's all on hard drive), and there would be no rehearsal CDs for the band or the dancers until August when I returned from Italy. Needless to say I got two extra weeks, and the new lighting tech signed on a week late... problem solved.

All in all, my first time on a ship was fun from a new experience standpoint, but professionally, it sucked. I've never worked under these conditions, and I don't plan on doing so again. After making my displeasure known to everyone, changes were made to prevent this from happening again. I will be arriving to the ship the same time as the TD and lighting. The Hotel and Cruise Directors will be personally notified as to how much time I require onboard and I will make the decision whether I leave earlier than expected. And finally, I have an office ID now, so there will be no more clerical errors or questions as to who I am and what I'm doing onboard.

We'll see if these changes stick, otherwise, I'll be staying on the West Coast on a more permanent basis.

Ball of Confusion by The Temptations

Now that I have some free time, I can bring all of you up to speed on what has been happening the past few weeks:

Vrooom! That's name of the production show I've been working on for two weeks, and quite easily one of the most difficult productions I've been involved in; it started off bad and continued to roll down hill from there. Since portions of Vrooom! existed on other ships, I was asked to edit three different shows together to make up most of the show audio ("tape") for this ship... easy enough. Then I was asked to add new portions of the show, but they sounded nothing like the original tracks from the other shows, this raised the difficulty level up because there was a radical change in sound and it all needed to flow together in and out of the original parts. After a week of editing and mixing, the day before the show opening it was decided that the 55 seconds needed to be removed from one portion of the show, and 6 minutes of material needed to be added to the end of the show. With digital editing this normally isn't problem, however, it wasn't just audio, dancers needed updated choreography, video clips that needed to be re-edited, lighting and scenery drops that needed to be re-synced to the music, and pyro that needed to be reprogrammed... our dress rehearsals were an absolute nightmare, and I questioned whether the show needed to go on... it did. The first two minutes went smoothly, which should have served as a warning of the technical nightmare about to befall us:

"Tape" stopped rolling in the middle of our third song... oh... shit. Apparently, the audio playback system, which I won't mention the model or manufacturer out of sheer embarrassment (no, not Pro Tools), had a corrupt file that caused it to crash... this is after my boss crowed about how stabile they were... gee, thanks. Since I run the show via timecode, all automation came to a stop: lights, scenery, video, pyro, it was like we hit an iceberg and the show was about to meet it's water grave... and the band played on. Yes folks, the good news is that we have a 7-piece band on board, whose sole purpose is to add realism to our production tracks that continued to play. Usually, when the tape stops rolling, they stop playing, but singers were still singing, dancers were still dancing, and they kept the show rocking until I could get playback up and running. After a quick reboot, the machine was up and cued, but I had another problem: the show wasn't going to start in the exact place the band was playing, and to make matters worse, the machine was about to restart 5 seconds before a pyro cue and the dancers would have been out of position (remembered what happened to Michael Jackson?). To avoid this, I had to skip ahead another 10 seconds, which luckily was the beginning of the next song... whew! After a brief moment of weirdness, everyone locked back in and the show continued with relatively minor technical issues: miscued video, out of sync lights and lasers, pyro duds, and missing scenery drops. Yes, it looked like monkeys humping a football, but the crowd didn't noticed... thank goodness for drunk vacationers.

Bonus: The song for this blog entry is one of the numbers performed in Vrooom! (Mainly because it is stuck in my head... enjoy!)

Disco Inferno by the Trammps

Sorry folks, I've come to realize that high-speed internet is necessary for blogging, and unfortunately, I'm lucky if I can get anything resembling dial-up at this point. The good news is I have almost 3 weeks of blog entries and photos, the bad news is they are piled up waiting for a trip to Starbuck's so I can use their internet to upload them. Please be patient as I'm working on the problem... in the meantime, enjoy the song of the day. Oh yeah... I had to stop adding iTunes links because it takes forever and too much bandwidth to look them up.
Gotta love shipboard internet.

Pick Up the Pieces by Average White Band

Greetings from the Port of Miami!



Yeah... that's a big boat! Welcome to my new home for he next few months: the M/S Carnival Victory. My first day was near total chaos from the time I hit the shack in the bottom center of the picture. I was told I needed to bring my luggage on the ship by my supervisor and coworkers, however, the guard at the shack told me to take my luggage to the wrong spot and it almost didn't make the ship, luckily the ship's crew found my luggage I.D. and matched it the crew list. But this created another problem: my medical information was in my "checked" luggage, and since it was lost, I couldn't get my ship I.D... stupid mistake, I know, but I was able to get the key to my cabin on deck six (I was on "Deck Zero"). After making a seven deck hike up the stairs to find my cabin (the elevators were packed full of passengers and locked out of the crew area), it was time to check in with my technical crew. I found them on deck five of the port side moving stage sets on to the ship via a crane... immediately I jumped in and helped out. When all the sets were loaded, it was time off load the old 1000+ lb. audio console that was once in the main lounge; having to shove what was a $150,000 piece of equipment off the side of the ship was a little scary, but the crane got it down safely. Afterwards, I met with the Technical Director and he promptly informed me Crew Management was patiently waiting for my medical information and they wanted me to return to the office on "Deck Zero" to contact security. After the six deck hike to the management office, they gave me the number to security and told me to return to my cabin to contact them... again, up six decks of stairs (the passengers were still boarding the ship) to call security only to find out my bags were back on "Deck Zero" around the corner from Crew Management.... oh great. With yet another round trip, still using the stairs, I finally had my luggage, my medical, and was able to fully check in and attend new crew orientation which lasted about 45 minutes and gave us our training schedule for the rest of the cruise. Finally, I had some free time only to notice the ship had already pushed out of it berth and starting out to sea; yes, it was that smooth. Check out the photo gallery to see the pictures I took from Deck Four Forward (near the bow of the ship). My first day ended with my first show, it was fairly low impact and the crew did great job, but it appears I have a lot of work ahead of me... I'm just glad to be smoothly out to sea.

Miami by Will Smith