Being Nasty at the desk, and nice the rest of the time.

Well… it’s been busy.

It is busy!

We’ve left Australia, and are sailing currently to East Timor. The programme team have a new manager, who is bent on reforming them and is changing many ways of working, becoming more team based:

brainstorming rather than ivory tower development of programmes,
Flexi-time working, everyone chipping in rather than fixed hours, and so on.

The AV team isn’t really part of the programmes team (go figure), but we work a lot with them, and so I’ve been trying to push my team into being at as much of this voyage’s programme team time as possible. Attending devotions with them, being at the creativity sessions, and so on.

This morning we had a fairly good session, which I led, I was trying to get them to think outside of the box in reguards to how we use our venue. The on board “Main Lounge” is most frequently set up with all the programme happening in one “stage” section at the front, and then rows of chairs at the back, or tables in a cafe setting. Often the most transformation the room gets is having curtains put up, perhaps fairy lights and lots of flags (you know, the whole international thing).

Anyway. We can do so much more. Once we started imagining things, ideas like turning the whole room into a Japanese Garden, with an island in the middle and a moat and bridges and stuff came up. Building a slum from Manilla out of the whole room, hanging the curtains to turn it into a ginormous beduin-style tent, and so on. One group even thought of having a “Indiana Jones” type set up, with different areas of the lounge being different places around the world, tying up some of the audience with a knife suspended above their head and then dropping it on them if their team-mates didn’t answer the questions of a quiz correctly…

Some of the ideas may take a little modifying. Health and Safety, you know.

Still, it was a good session, and then we looked through a lot of our video clips collection, to talk about what we can use, how we can use videos we have more effectively, and so on.

This evening was the weekly prayer-night, which this week was being run by the on board School. It was somewhat chaotic, as these kinds of things are wont to be.

Anyway, the guy who was leading the musicy part of it didn’t bring me a song list at all (which is mentioned on the pre-event A/V form, which he otherwise did fill in), and then half an hour before we began, during his sound check time, he brought up two new songs which needed to be entered into the database while I was trying to sound check them… He know’s it’s supposed to be 24 hours before an event that they give in any new songs.

Still, I told him off, but put the songs in anyway. So, quite hectic. It all went really well in the end, and sounded pretty good, all the songs worked, and so on. Apparently I made an impression on him though, as after the evening was finished, he showed up at the sound desk with a large bar of chocolate to say sorry for being so late all the time!! Amazing!