As Peter had said, we will have a lot of challenges that we have to be prepared for and it is our job to make sure we can think on our feet and run with it. The first major challenge that we had to address was that not everyone on the workshop had turned up on the first day. More people will be joining us tomorrow that we will have to figure out a plan for. So our whole day of planning on Thursday needed to be adjusted.

We started the work shop by splitting into groups. (Luckily we have a lot of very skilled video people that can guide us) so we assessed our skills and made two groups of five. We had 5 people in the groups assigned to us which we would then be working on to create a 2-3 minute video to raise awareness of the inter faith issues that they felt passionately about. After a brief introduction from us we started mind mapping things in their lives that meant most to them.

– Culture
– Environmental Issues
– Marriage (Divorce)
– Peace

After talking through what all of these issues meant to them we dribbled across a common ground.
CULTURE

They explained to us how proud they were that they were Kenyans, and how many tribes there were that were mixing successfully in community. This seemed like a topic they really wanted to explore and encourage. So we altered our main topic to INTERCULTURAL and then set out addressing the negatives and positive of intercultural diversity. We all decided on the subject of how marriage has become an primary way of allowing the different tribes to engage with each other, and learn from each other. How it was becoming popular in keeping their rich culture alive whilst also progressing and changing. (This sounded like something I really wanted to understand more about. With the title of ‘Peace, Marriage and Cultural Diversity’ we set about constructing questions that they wanted to address. We showed our team how to story board their ideas and plan out how they were going to film this documentary and to my surprise everyone was very engaging and enthusiastic. (This was a relief as it seemed to be a bit of a struggle to get them motivated at the start). After a brief introduction to story boarding we showed them the equipment they were going to be using and taught them a few useful tips whilst videoing documentaries. We then explained the key roles, eg producer, director, camera man etc and let them choose what they would like to be. It was so nice to see them engage and get excited about their roles and really get into character. We then had a mock interview with Taylor and I as the interviewees, (this was fun as we had no idea about intercultural marriages in Kenya. They laughed at some of our silly answers. We then talked through b roll ideas and started filming our very first scene. In this scene their would be two hands with weddings rings on them, the idea was that they were symbolising how two different cultures can be brought together in unity. So I volunteered my hand for the job ( it was nice to be married if only for a few minutes.)

After that we filmed a few more b roll shots and discussed what we were planning to do with the interviews tomorrow.

By the end of the day we were all shattered from a pretty hands on first day but it was very rewarding to say the least. I think our team bonded well and I look forward to continuing to work with them again tomorrow.

Our last thing for the day was to visit the Maasai markets which were so very busy and so overwhelming after the day we had, I didn’t end up buying anything which is probably for the best.