Lessons Learned At Sea

As we ease into summer and the warm weather signals backyard bbq’s, fireworks, and al fresco dinners on the lanai, one thing in particular that always comes into my mind is not only the increased opportunities to go sailing, but the valuable lessons I have learned from the sea and how they apply to my work everyday.

These lessons not only apply to my work specifically, nor is the sea unique in its ability to impart these lessons, but for me, this is how I came to the following conclusions, and through it, how I recognize others who have the same skillset regardless of how they came about it.

Those of you who know me or follow this blog know that I make a living in film production. Film production can best be described as organized chaos. The closest analogy would probably either be the circus or the military. Firefighting and sailing also seem to attract similar personalities.

What is it that links these five trades together? It is the diversity of experience required and the ability to tie it all together into a working model. It’s that every day is different, and that you need to be able to pull from a variety of resources in order to get the job done.

For example, every couple days, the carnies pack up shop and switches from the business of running an attraction to coordinating the logistics of moving to a new town and setting up tents, living trailers, and rides to best suit the space they’re given. They don’t have meetings about meetings to discuss whether they should serve icees or frozen lemonade, which tent comes down first, or months of walking out the plot and fighting over whose trailer is placed next to whom. They simply do what needs to be done and figure it out.

It’s the same with the military and firefighters. They don’t have the advantage of gaining troop consensus and running models before deciding to move on an enemy position or deciding to fight a fire, they have to think on their feet and get it done. They need to be able to assess the situation and exploit what assets they have on hand.

When your position is over-run by enemy insurgents, or a freak storm hits and blows the big top over, you can’t say “it’s not my job” or “I’ve got to pick my son up from soccer”, you jump in and grab a gun, a line, or improvise, and do what you need to do to save the show. 

It’s these lessons that have most prepared me for film production more than anything else. 

The sea is a temperamental mistress. She can be kind and gentle on a warm summer day, with calm seas and a gentle breeze, but she can turn at the slightest provocation, gusting to 50 knots and sending waves that threaten to engulf your boat. It is for these reasons that I have learned to be constantly vigilant, and am always looking for the tiniest telltales that something isn’t right. It’s what the military calls situational awareness, and I start running lists in my head of what I need to do to first alleviate the situation or if necessary, what must be done to rectify it if it’s already too late.

The next lesson is that a boat run by democracy is a recipe for disaster. We don’t have the luxury to be able to sit and debate on what to do when a storm comes in or a container ship is bearing down on us, there’s a strict hierarchy and we place our trust in our superiors and rely on our subordinates. Each man has a responsibility and only through the trust we have in each other to get their portion of the job done can we accomplish the task at hand. The knowledge knowing that in the case of fire, your responsibility is to work the pumps to insure the boat doesn’t flood is important. We all can’t be the hero fighting the fire, nor can we all sit idly by discussing what we do in the same situation. The trust that you have in your fellow crew members and they in you to do your job is crucial on a successful voyage since the smallest deviation could mean life or death.

We also can't let ourselves be bogged down with our job description. It's important to know the job of the guy sitting next to you, above you, and below you. I make it a point to teach those below me my job and give them the opportunity to do my job just as I appreciate superiors that do the same. The reason for this on a boat is that any number of things can happen and that guy isn't available. You might be washed overboard and if you're the one assigned to drive the boat to go and get the man overboard, unless someone is trained and ready to jump in your place, you're going to die. If you're not willing to do the job of your subordinates, how do you relate to their problems to best lead them? Same going the other direction. If you don't know the job of your superior, how will you know if what you're doing is helping or harming them?

Finally, there's no such thing as turnaround or overtime at sea. Sometimes, you just have to pull up your sleeves, get another cup of coffee and soldier on. The storm isn't going to wait for you to get your union stipulated turnaround to hit, and leaving your post because you've been up for 20 hours already isn't an option when the boat is taking on water. When it's all hands on deck, it doesn't matter if you've already been on watch for 8 hours or you only been asleep for half an hour. It's because of this mentality that you could be called on 24 hours a day that we're also more respectful of the schedule when not in an emergency situation. You make allowances to your fellow crew members to take care of personal needs if the opportunity arises because you know they would not only do the same for you, but that if push comes to shove, you have no doubt they will be up out of bed or work a double shift to save the ship.

Hollywood is like that. Sure there’s a lot of meetings and planning and models being discussed and hashed out in the executive suites but on the ground is a different story. On a typical one hour episodic television series, each episode takes 8 days to film. The episodes are filmed consecutively, one after another with no break in between. Thus, during the course of a season, you’re generally prepping one episode, shooting another, and wrapping out the previous episode all at the same time.

Each day of filming usually involves one or two locations out in the real world where we take our couple hundred cast and crew, pack everything up in trucks and drive out to some random location. There, we need to find a parking lot nearby our cast and crew can park, and where we can set up all our trucks, trailers, and tent to serve lunch. Vans need to arranged to bring our cast and crew to the shooting location, permits need to be arranged with the city for filming, property owners need to be negotiated with for the use of their property to film, to stage equipment on, or simply as a courtesy since we’ll be shutting down the street and they’ll need to park on the next block over if they need to come and go. This happens every day, week in and week out, for the run of the show, usually some 8 months straight for a typical 24 episode network series.

Just as some people assume a military unit gets flown out to some war, shoots at some bad guys, and comes home, the logistics necessary behind the scenes in Hollywood is staggering when you first experience it.

In all these situations, the key element is being both precise and flexible. Precision in order to prevent an accident, whether it be correctly setting the big top so it doesn’t fall or knowing where the nearest water source is and its capacity. Flexible in the ability to improvise when things don’t turn out as planned. The crane got into an accident on the way to set and won’t be available in time or the actress is refusing to come out of her trailer and the schedule needs to be rearranged in order to get some value out of the hundreds of union crew members sitting around getting paid whether they do any work or not.

It’s because of the very nature of the trades I gave above, I’ve found that people with similar backgrounds tend to not only to have a more well rounded skillset, can work well in a team and individually, and have an understanding for the need to have a box of preferred parameters but also willing go outside the box to get the job done if need be.

These are the most important traits I look for in young students looking to work behind the scenes in Hollywood.

Just being good with a camera or having gone to the right school isn’t enough. In my experience, situational awareness, common sense, and being able to think on your feet are much more important to success than the right degree and nine times out of ten, I'll hire the individual with more applicable real world experience than the individual with the perfect resume.

For more articles like this, please follow my blog at www.kentmatsuoka.com.