Bioregioning Tayside

The brief

The Glasgow School of Art commissioned three films through Bioregioning Tayside, a community interest company that works on restoring the ecological systems of the Tay bioregion. Each film covers a different community-led project: Wild Strathfillan in the north of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, the River Eden Sustainability Partnership in Fife, and Blairgowrie and Rattray Development Trust in Perthshire.

The unusual part of the commission was that the projects chose what their own film was for. Wild Strathfillan wanted something it could send to funders. The other two wanted a visual record of work already done. That is one commissioner, one filmmaker and three subjects, but it is not one brief, and treating it as one would have produced three films that each did their job at about sixty per cent.

Underneath that sits the harder problem common to all three. Nature restoration has no visible event. A river catchment does not look like anything in particular on a given Tuesday, the results arrive over decades rather than seasons, and there is no finish line to point a camera at. Every other kind of film I make has something that happens. These do not.

The approach

A film for funders and a film for the record want different footage, and the difference is decided on the shoot rather than in the edit.

A funding panel is a small, motivated, sceptical audience that has already chosen to sit down and watch. It does not need hooking in three seconds, which is the usual advice and the wrong advice here, but it does need convincing. It is assessing whether the plan is sound and whether the people behind it will deliver, so the film has to put those people on camera making their own case, and use the ground to show honestly how much of it there is. Wild Strathfillan covers around 50,000 hectares and involves more than thirty land managers, communities, charities and public bodies. A film that made that look small would be doing the project harm.

A record has a different test, which is whether it still earns its place in ten years in front of people who were there. That pushes towards the work itself and the people doing it, filmed where it happens, and away from anything that will date. It also means being more complete than a promotional cut would be. The River Eden film runs to ten minutes and forty seconds because the partnership is genuinely made of several organisations with different stretches of river and different reasons for caring about it, and dropping four of them would have made a tidier film and a worse record.

Aerial work carries more weight in all three than it would in most commissions, because it is the only way to show a catchment as one continuous thing. On the ground a river is a series of disconnected places. From the air the Eden reads as a single corridor from the county boundary to the estuary, which is the whole argument the partnership is making. In Strathfillan the aerials do the opposite job, showing how much ground the project has taken on.

I filmed and edited all three alone, across three areas that share almost nothing on the surface: Fife farmland, a Perthshire town, and a Highland strath.

The outcome

Three films, twenty six minutes in total, each able to stand alone because each goes to a different audience for a different purpose.

The commission also put a client type on this site that was not here before. Community-led nature restoration in Scotland is funded seriously, through the Scottish Government's Nature Restoration Fund, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and NatureScot among others, and the organisations doing the work are constantly having to explain it to people who have not stood in it. That is a film problem, and it is close to the documentary and landscape work I already do.

There is a local thread in it too. Blairgowrie and Rattray Development Trust is one of the two community anchor organisations in the River Ericht catchment, which is the same ground as the Cateran Ecomuseum and the Caterans Commonwealth film.

The thinking behind the two briefs is set out in the journal: Environmental Video Production in Scotland.