CLICK HERE FOR
AVID SALE INFO

Situated on the Pennine border of Cumbria and Northumberland, Wildcat Films is England's highest and remotest independent film production company. Formed in 1987 by journalist Jacqui Marson and director David Baillie, the company initially built its reputation on current affairs reports from some of the world's most remote and inaccessible places. Early exclusives included the first confirmed report of ozone depletion over the Arctic, an investigation into heroin smuggling from Afghanistan, and the first ever pictures from the glacier war between India and Pakistan 25,000 feet up in the Himalayas.

In 1989 we became the first independent to produce a report for Channel 4 News and went on to pioneer the role of independent production at ITN. From 1990 production was concentrated on full length documentaries, mainly on environmental or development subjects. Channel 4 commissions have included films on arctic pollution and minefield clearance. The company has also produced wildlife programming for Channel 4 and our natural history documentary Wildlife Cop won the Originality Award at the 1997 Montana International Wildlife Film Festival.

Commissions form the BBC have ranged from a series for schools television to a current affairs special on biological weapons. ITV regional credits include various documentaries for Tyne Tees, Granada, Yorkshire and Border TV. In 1996 we moved into drama production with An Angel Passes By which won Best TV Drama award at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

In the past ten years our programmes have also received twelve awards from the northern region of the Royal Television Society, and in 2001 Wildcat Director/DoP David Baillie received the Bafta nomination for factual cinematography. In 2002 Wildcat Films was awarded IVCA Silver Award. In the same year David Baillie was the principle DoP in the production team which won the 2002 Bafta for Best TV Series for BBC 2's Horizon.

Although Wildcat Films does not market itself as a non-broadcast producer we have produced a number of educational and promotional videos. Our clients have include the Department of Trade & Industry, the Health & Safety Executive, the Department for International Development, and the Centre for Applied Microbiology Research.

Our current development into feature production involves work on two full length scripts including a screen adaptation of The Other Landscape by Scottish novelist Neil Gunn, and Flight, recently developed through the Moonstone programme. Initial funding for Flight has been received from Northern Film & Media and North West Vision and key scenes will be shot in Spring 2003. [download Flight script in rtf format] [download Flight synopsis in MS Word]

Unusually for a small independent we have our own in house Digibeta camera equipment as well as Avid MC9000 online editing and a full digital sound dubbing suite. These facilities have enabled us to offer training and work experience to a number of unemployed local people in the North Pennines. Many of these former Wildcat employees are now fully employed elsewhere in the broadcast industry as a result of this early support and training.