Supervising the building of a themed project that is seven thousand kilometres distant is a definite challenge. I make frequent trips to check on the progress and make sure everyone understands the next steps but there is still a lot that happens on a daily basis when I am not there.. Theme parks are designed on paper but in actual fact built by eye as everything needs to be fabricated to a visual standard. A whole lot needs to be considered including sight lines, people flow and seamless story telling. Cell phones, digital communication and video conferencing makes things a whole lot easier than it used to be. But describing small nuances to the fluid design is always a challenge. I explain to the onsite crew what I want based on my experience. They hear and understand what I say based on their experience. There is aways a gap between the telling and listening. The way to solve this dilemma is with plenty of sketches and notes as we proceed.
At this point the crews are in the process of laying out the playing greens for the adventure golf. I had laid everything out carefully with paint spray bombs on my recent trip but heavy rains and construction traffic made much of my line work disappear over the last weeks. The solution was for the crews to lay things out as best they could remember and then take some high elevation shots of the result. They then sent me those pictures and I tweaked things and added notes digitally as necessary and sent it back to them. With the new information they can adjust the lines and continue the work. By the time I get to Trinidad next week things will have progressed a great deal on these areas and we can lay out the next work to be done.
In the next few weeks this thing is going to come together at last!
