IT IS 29 YEARS since I joined FCS and I cannot recall a year which was so exciting and so enjoyable. There was a time during the 90s when I used to call FCS a hive of passivity, and the Chairman seemed to be going round stirring up apathy, but that has certainly not applied in the last year. It has been a privilege, a pleasure and a source of great pride to me to be Chairman of the Society during that year. I have been reatly assisted by an able and enthusiastic committee, consisting of no less than five former Chair-men, plus Adam, Eileen and Jean. I cannot thank them enough for their input, without which I would have been totally lost.

First and foremost, congratulations to all our award- winners who keep the FCS flag flying so proudly. Michael Slowe , Leo Ugo and now Vincent Kenny-Tempest have all done us proud. Vincent has certainly hit the Club like a tempest, and I do hope he has enjoyed his year of membership and benefited from the knowledge and advice he has gained from our more experienced members. The amount of technical now-how possessed by our membership never ceases to stagger me, and this was reinforced by the very earned technical discussion we had after the stills competition in which one of the attenders gave an interesting contribution, and the exhibitors them- selves produced wonderful results on the latest technology. What a contrast to the year when I joined FCS , when the most advanced item of equipment which I saw seemed to be a chinagraph pencil!

I welcome new members Alan Douglas, Marnie Dharma and David Greene and hope they will enjoy their time with us. We have changed our venue successfully to QMH, and I thank our hosts for their co-operation and hope that we have not been too much of a burden to them. I am indebted to my predecessor, Joe Spalter, whose expertise and patience enabled us to cling on to Avenue House until we were ready to move. In moving premises we have also upgraded our equipment. This has not been without its problems and we are still struggling to overcome the technical gremlins which assail us. As well as award-winners in external competitions I must also congratulate the award-winners in our own competitions. I previously mentioned our youngest member. I now mention one of our oldest members, Frits, who, having come through a difficult operation with great courage and cheerfulness, went on to find glory in our annual competition. This glory was well deserved, but a note of caution. I would say to Frits as always, it is difficult enough to climb to the top, but it is even more difficult to stay on top. It seems to me that every week new equipment comes onto the market, threatening to make the previous equipment obsolete. We had an example of this with the new high-definition camera demonstrated so ably by Michael Slowe and Peter Kidman . It is so state of-the-art that it is not even possible to project what it produces to maximum benefit. The result is as if Mozart's playing had been recorded by the composer onto a machine, but no machine capable of playing it back was marketed until the 1990s. This is the way we live now.

Upon taking office as Chairman, I discovered that the immediate task for the committee was to arrange the year's programme in advance, and this resulted in a great deal of brainstorming until late at night on several occasions. I thank the programme committee for its hard work, which was very fruitful, as our programme over the last year has been really excellent. I cannot recall a disappointing evening. One of the earliest evenings of my Chair-manship was given by Peter Swinson, a technical consultant. It was intensely technical, and we learned all about exabytes and petabytes(?). Even on that occasion Mr Swinson was well matched by our own members in the discussion. The following week the presentation was by Harley Cockliss (by courtesy of Joe Spalter). He turned up late and in the meantime, Alan Amor demonstrated computerised storyboarding. When Mr Cockliss finally appeared with his film Pilgrim, he was very entertaining but without Alan's impromptu performance the evening would have fallen rather flat. Our summer shoot-out took place in June and Eileen produced an interesting film made with the widow of Gerard Hoffnung. Our members' competition took place on June 28 and I had the honour of winning it myself, but it was interesting that the up-and- coming talent of Frits was also in evidence in that competition. Leo also put in a film.

On September 17 I made my first visit to Wanstead & Woodford Club for the Annual Knockout Competition. This was an extremely difficult venue to locate, and Kenneth who guided me, seemed to have psychic powers of finding the building! I found the whole occasion to be somewhat of a let-down, and the atmosphere was not nearly as pleasant as at our Club. The result was a draw. Kenneth later gave us a talk on commentary speaking. As usual, his voice conveyed pace, grace and space.

Alan Amor provided us with further entertain-ment both with story- boarding and also in due course with the stills competition, which he organised brilliantly. We had an evening given by David Crossman, who spoke about camera-work and encouraged us to use the manual controls on our camcorders as well as the automatic ones. On October 15, Oliver Barry gave us a showing of his film Change Makers, which featured the Peruvian women's football team and music in Colombia, as well as more serious films about cystic fibrosis and depression, made for BBC-TV. A less depressed per-son I have never met, and even his film about depression cheered me up! On November 19 we had an evening from Vadim Jean showing his latest commercials. Vadim also gave his judgment on Vincent's film Sod's Law, which he pronounced very good. On December 3 Peter Kidman put on 'Cinema on Cinema, The Smallest Show

Adam and Vincent showed us 15 films from the Bristol Film Festival which made us re-think the rule book. Leo confessed to being dumbfounded but made up for this on March 4 by producing an evening of his own films. Leo was ready to start in record time. After the demonstration of the high-definition camera we went to the annual competition, won by Michael Slowe with his film, Melissa, about a trapeze artist, but even he did not escape criticism from the judge - Aivar Kaulins. Our annual competition had nine entries which was quite satisfactory.

Incidentally, myself had the privilege of being the sole judge of Potters Bar's annual competition, which contained 22 entries, but in my opinion such a marathon is neither necessary nor productive. Of the 22 entries at Potters Bar, only six were really suitable material for a prestigious competition. I have mentioned the programme in some detail because I am really proud of it and I think you will all agree that it has been very successful. Our social events have also been extremely satisfactory and we must thank Jean, Frits and the fish-and- chip team for their hospitality and organis-ation.

Finally, a word about our great hope - Hubert's Travels. We had a memorable afternoon at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley, where the premiere took place in the presence of such dignitaries as Brian Coleman, the Chairman of the GLA, who, incidentally, lives in Essex Park, N3, so he should be a member! The degree of hard work and concentration put in to the production of a film like Hubert was amply dem-onstrated when Alan Amor showed an extract from his forthcoming film on the making of Hubert. Con-gratulations to all involved and here's hoping that Hubert still has a long way to travel. He is doing very well so far.

Norman Saville

FCS ANNUAL COMPETITION

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2005

1st place and the Oscar Reisel Memorial Award - Melissa - Michael Slowe

2nd place and Best Camerawork, Best Documentary & Best Editing - Cappadocia - Frits Cohen

3rd place and the Best Commentary - In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro- Leo Ugo

4th place - Goldie - Maria Rumsey

5th place and Best Humour - The Great Holiday Movie Row - Trevor Williams

The judge was Aivar Kaulins

CHAIRMAN'S REVIEW OF 2004/5 - AGM, MAY 7, 2004

I BELIEVE THAT, generally speaking, we have had a good year as a Club. The balance of programmes was, in my opinion, very good indeed. I am very pleased with the quality of our evenings and the way the programmes have such variety of subject and have alternated week on week. We ran 40 evenings last year, which for a Club of our size is remarkable - most of them were produced by our own members. We had eight visiting speakers, most were professionals from the film industry, such as Bill Cartlidge (for the second time), who worked on some of the Bond films and Alfie, and scriptwriter Terry Hodgkinson, who wrote many of the episodes of The Bill for ITV. Also, from the world of amateur films, Tom Hardwick and Mick Cobert from St Albans with his blue screen, and a little local history from Gerry Turvey on film-making in Finchley in the last 100 years. David Mulligan showed us wound make-up.

We had four good 'hands-on' evenings - Adam Young's Date Mate, which was our 'Film in a Fortnight', and Trevor Williams' 'Midsummer Shoot', also Bruce Allams' University Challenge, each giving us the opportunity to do something with fellow-members that was not normally possible on one's own. On 10 evenings we showed films from outside the Club, either professional in clips, etc, or amateur films such as IAC winners in 'So You Want to Be a Judge?', or films from other Clubs; one evening was even on 16mm film, courtesy of Richard Landis. Sventeen were what I have called member-generated presentations, such as Peter Kidman's on copyright music, Alan Amor's evening on camera technique, Michael Slowe's evening of Night Mail and Terminus and parts of some of his own prize-winning films. 'Clips with a Purpose' makes one think of what to present to fellow-members and can cause some interesting discussion.

Also, of course, 'Work in Progress' evenings, which I would like to see more of, so we have the chance to view and show our work to each other. We had three good social evenings - the BBQ at Frits Cohen's, the Fish & Chips Supper organised by Norman and Yvonne Saville and, of course, the Gala Evening last July, where we invited the short-listed writers of the first Barnet Script-writing Competition, and presented Rick Limentani with his winner's certificate for Hubert's Travels.

Here, I must mention the filming of Hubert's Travels - we have a very fine team in Producer Trevor Williams, Director and Camera Michael Slowe, Director of Photography and Editor Bruce Allams, Lighting Peter Kidman, on Sound we have Stephen Kenny- Tempest, Continuity is Eileen Kenning. The 'Making of the Film' Documentary is by the team of Alan Amor and Adam Young. And members of FCS are acting in the film: Norman Saville, Vincent Kenny-Tempest, Kenneth Seeger, Trevor Williams, Muriel Agius, John Cronin and, of course, myself! We held two competitions within the Club, the three-minute competition won by Michael Slowe and the Annual in March, the results of which will be announced after tea. Also, we took part in the North Thames Region's Triangle Trophy Competition last year at St Albans but did not win. We did not take part this year as we did not have a suitable Set Theme entry to make up the required programme. I hope we will enter something in the next Triangle. In September we had our annual match with Wanstead & Woodford for the Joe Smith Trophy, which we won this time around.

I must thank my committee for all the hard work they have done, Deputy Chairman Norman Saville, Minutes Secretary Eileen Kenning, Hon Treasurer Peter Kidman, Programme Secretary Kenneth Seeger, Social Secretary Jean Bumstead, also Trevor Williams, Bruce Allams and Adam Young. Also, before I forget, our Projection Team which has consisted of Alan Amor, Norman Ashton, Luis Fernandes, Adam Young and others; I would like to thank Martin Williams and Michael Slowe for allowing us to use their video projector while ours is not usable. Peter Thomlinson is our Webmaster but he has decided to leave FCS, at least for the time being; I thank him for the work he has done in setting up our website, but we do need someone to take over and keep the website going - a lot of inquiries do come from it.

As you have heard, our financial position is such that we will have to move from Avenue House for our Club nights. The committee has decided to go to the Quaker Meeting House in Alexandra Grove, North Finchley, on Friday nights from September. The main reason is that it will cost us £30 an evening as against £52 an evening to stay at Avenue House. We will be able to come back to Avenue House for special shows or events, as we would only hire this room week by week - we would be known as a casual user of Avenue House. I hope we go on from strength to strength even after our move; we will, I hope, make more films after Hubert. We have been asked to make a record of the East Barnet Community Festival which is on July 2-4 in Oak Hill Park, and we have been offered £200 to do it.

We have also been asked to add sound and a commentary to our film of the anniversary of the Charter granted to Finchley, and there will be a fee for doing that. Peter Kidman and myself have been providing the Highgate Society with projection facilities for their monthly film show, for which we receive a fee for the Club funds, but it will not be possible to continue this unless someone else takes it over - any volunteers?! So, in conclusion, there are things to do and a good future for the Club. Thank you. Joe Spalter

FCS ANNUAL COMPETITION, FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 2004

1st - On Silk - Michael Slowe (also Oscar Reisel Award, Best Camerawork and Best Documentary)

2nd - Potter's Lunch - Michael Slowe (also Best Editing)

3rd - On Top of the World - Norman Saville

4th - Let the Children Come - Leo Ugo

5th - Snatcher Vincent Kenny- Tempest

The judge was Christine Collins, FACI.