Hard to believe I've been onboard for more than 2 weeks and have not posted anything yet. Just goes to show how busy it has been!
Coming back to the same ship is something I haven't experienced before. It's nice to see so many familiar faces, not just within the production team but all over the ship as well. The other 3 times I have signed onto a ship, I didn't recognize more than 1-2 people and it took some time to feel comfortable. This was not the case this time however, and as soon as I got onboard I immediately set about writing out plans for how I'm going to get my venues back in top shape.
Unfortunately there has been a lack of maintenance with some of my fixtures while I was away, leaving a bit of a pile-up for me upon my return. This, coupled with the double charter cruise we did last week, has lead to an extremely busy first couple of weeks... with no end in sight at this point. The charter was especially demanding on all of us. We had two 3.5 day cruises with a total of about 5000 guests between the two, and 100% of them were from France. It was very unusual hearing all of the usual announcements made over the PA solely in French. We were expected to compress many of our usual activities of a 7 day cruise into each 3ish day cruise. This meant doing 6 ice shows, 4 parades, 6 theme nights, 2 captains welcome receptions, and 8 production shows during a 7 day period where we would normally only have half as many (with the exception of the ice shows, of which we usually have 4 in a week).
A nice benefit of this charter was getting to sail into Istanbul on what is probably the largest ship ever to call there. Istanbul is one port where you definitely do not want to miss the sail-in. I went up to the Helipad while we sailed into Istanbul so that I would have the best possible view.
This week we started cast install in the theatre. Since my 4 follow spot operators in Studio B are usually dancers, this means I will have a bit more difficult time getting spot cues done correctly over the next few weeks as generally the replacements that are sent to me have not used a follow spot before. In a few weeks time they will have learned all their shows/events and then I will finally be able to start teaching them the spot cues for Ice Odyssey. It’s a difficult show when it comes to spot cues so it’s really important to consistently have the same people doing it every time. By the time they’re halfway through their contract, generally spot operators will have memorized all of their cues and I will no longer have to call them. Unfortunately for me, I missed most of the second half of the previous dancers’ contracts so I never really got to sit back and watch the show a bit without having to call the spot cues. The solution to this is to record the spot cues… which I will be doing sometime next month after I have the money to buy the equipment and software to do it. The beauty of buying my own stuff is that I can take it to every ship and use it over and over with different shows which will be great.
I’m currently typing this from my cabin onboard. Using my TIM 3G USB stick I am able to get Internet in my cabin, courtesy of the porthole which I am very lucky to have (I believe there is only 1 tech cabin with a port hole).
Anyway, better get back to work.
