Three Wheel Drive
Documentary
The brief
Three Wheel Drive was made with the Adaptive Riders Collective. It is a film about adaptive mountain biking, and underneath that about a harder question: who gets to access Scotland's wild places on a bike, and on what terms.
Most of what exists online about disability and mountain biking is short-form and promotional: a clip, a caption, a call to donate. The standard treatment leans on one register, triumph over adversity set to music, and treats the rider's disability as the whole story and the riding as incidental. Anyone who has spent time with adaptive riders knows that gets the emphasis backwards. The film had to take the sport seriously on its own terms and give the question of access the length it needed.
The approach
The film combines action cinematography with personal testimony, and the two do different jobs.
The riding is filmed as sport, not as spectacle: line choice, terrain reading, and the specific mechanics of how an adapted bike handles ground that was never built with it in mind. The usual sport-filming discipline of anticipation, reading where a rider is about to be rather than reacting to where they have just been, still applies, recalibrated for a different machine and a different line.
The testimony carries the argument the riding cannot make on its own. Scotland's outdoor access laws are unusually generous, but a legal right to roam and a physically rideable trail are two different things, and that gap is not visible in a wide shot of a hill. It has to be said by the people who run into it, in their own words and at enough length to be an argument rather than a soundbite. Planning for both strands began at the first recce, rather than fitting the interviews in around the filming.
The outcome
Three Wheel Drive was selected for the Kendal Mountain Festival, the London Mountain Film Festival and the New York Tri-State International Film Festival in 2024, and won the People's Choice award at the Dundee Mountain Film Festival the same year. In 2025 it was selected for The Big Bike Film Night.
The People's Choice award is voted for by the audience rather than a jury, which makes it a direct measure of whether the film reached the people in the room. The film was still being selected a year after its first screenings.
The thinking behind the film is set out in the journal, in Filming Adaptive Sport, and what its festival run taught us is in Adventure Film Festivals: What Gets a Short Film Selected. The same principle, treating a subject as something to explain rather than illustrate, runs through the Comfort Zones case study.