Caterans Commonwealth

The brief

Caterans Commonwealth was initiated by a group of cultural and creative practitioners, voluntary and community organisations, businesspeople and civic leaders living and working around the Cateran Trail in highland Perthshire. The project aimed to celebrate the shared assets of this rural community and explore how those assets could help it sustain itself culturally, environmentally and economically.

Morrocco Media was commissioned to document the breadth of projects undertaken in the initiative's first two years and to create films that could communicate the spirit and ambition of the work to wider audiences.

The approach

The Cateran Trail passes through some of the most distinctive landscape in Perthshire: a terrain we know intimately. The production involved multiple shoot days across the area, covering individual community projects, interviews with the people behind them, and landscape footage that placed the work in its geographic context.

The approach was documentary in style: observational, unhurried and attentive to the specific details that make each project distinct. We were conscious that the film needed to honour the scale of effort the communities had put in while remaining accessible to audiences with no prior knowledge of the area or the initiative.

The outcome

The films delivered a lasting record of the initiative's first phase and provided Cateran Ecomuseum with assets that could be used across funding applications, public presentations and community communications. The combination of landscape cinematography and personal testimony gave the work a depth that reflected the ambition of the project itself.