Pro Moviemaker Spring 2018PMM_SPRING 2018

CASE STUDY JASONHENWOOD

Jason Henwood and director Katie Wardle have a special love for ScottishWildcats and set up a passion project highlighting this elusive creature

WORDS TERRY HOPE

A s wildlife subjects go there can’t be toomany that are harder to film than the Scottish wildcat. For a start there are precious few of them left these days – some estimates say that there are less than 300 pure breed animals left in Scotland – and to compound things they are incredibly solitary and secretive creatures, meaning that it’s hugely unlikely you would ever happen across one in the wild. All of which was a challenge that served to inspire filmmaker Jason Henwood and director Katie Wardle, but at the same time they were realistic enough to realise that their dreamof producing a film about the enigmatic subject that had so engaged themwould be anything but straightforward. Despite only having a

point of view it’s stemmed, of course, from watching the likes of Attenborough from a young age, but it’s only in the last year or so, since Katie and I have become more confident about our own abilities thanks to some of the amazing people that we’ve worked with, that we’ve been able to take the first steps towards making our dream come true.” The film Jason and Katie have just completed, called The Last Highland Tiger , was part of this and, by necessity, shooting time was restricted to a single week, since it was a very much a passion project that needed to be completed in personal time, in between commercial work. “It became clear very early on, through talking to experts who knew the species well, that the time we had wasn’t going

very limited amount of time within which to work, however, the determination was there to create something that would educate the public about what makes the critically endangered wildcat so special while demonstrating how its resourcefulness has helped it, to date, survive against all the odds. “Wildlife filmmaking has been something we’ve both been wanting to do for a very long time,” says Jason. “Frommy

“It’s by far the best documentary camera I’ve worked with”

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PRO MOVIEMAKER SPRING 2018

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