Saturday 24th November 2001 This week's session had a better level of attendance; eight group members turned up. With just one camera though, it was tricky bringing the camera skills of some group members up to date while keeping the others interested. Luckily, Kudze's circus equipment helped keep the group amused. We practised more camera exercises, trying to keep camera shake to a minimum, and identifying the sort of camerawork, which makes the audience seasick. During a tea break, we all sat down and talked about what makes a documentary film interesting. We talked about narrative storytelling and the different kinds of human emotions that make a story interesting. Emran told us about an interesting documentary he had watched about a boxer getting ready for a fight, and Samuel talked about a film he had seen on children being exploited in India. We used 'Pop Idol' and 'Popstars' as examples of watching other people's stories and emotions being interesting to watch where the audience can identify with the people and their feelings. The group decided that filming someone from Kudze's circus school getting ready for the "Cabaret" would be interesting and fun to do. We will try to find out a bit more about this. The Sharma girls mentioned that they do some dancing at a Christmas Fair at St. George's Market, this is another event we would like to film. We talked about keeping a record of feelings and emotions in the diary/ideas book as a way of telling a story. Emran offered an analogy story his Dad told him about a tree from a different country needing time to acclimatise in a new environment before it could grow properly again. Myself, I think that perhaps children of around 10, may not want to talk about the negative feelings they experience, their personalities are so energetic and positive, they tend to disregard the negative. Next week, we will introduce a more structured filmmaking exercise for the group members more confident with camera and sound skills. We will film a cookery demonstration, a subject the group are interested in, particularly from the multi-cultural perspective. We hope to introduce the other roles in film making such as continuity and directing. The group have been unclear as to the type of issues we are filming, we decided it is not necessarily about multi cultural issues just yet, just good film making and things they are interested in, we noted though that Belfast is a candidate for European City of Culture in 2008 and it would be interesting to look at Belfast in a broader cultural way. Angela