Tranquillity: Scotland’s slice of the wild west
By Molly Gibson
The most sucessful film shot in Tranquillity has over 45,000 views on Youtube
If you’re out near the Glendronach Distillery in Aberdeenshire you might just catch a glimpse of Tranquillity, a small town looking like it was plucked straight from the American old west. The town was a labour of love for its small group of Wild West enthusiasts, building the town from the ground up with little to no construction experience. Starting with the town's crowning building, the saloon in 2006, with the other buildings being constructed over the years until the town was completed in 2010 with the completion of the telegraph office.
The town is the meeting place of the Northern Rough Riders (NRR), a club of wild west enthusiasts founded by Alistair Baranowski, who get together to bring their wild west dreams to life. They meet most Sundays to play old west sports like shooting, knife and axe throwing, horseshoe pitching, mock gunfights and even sometimes go on trips to America to see other wild west reenactment groups. On top of that they also put on open days to the public and make wild west films.
The NRR both rent out their town as a wild west set and allow their own members to write and shoot films there. Micheal Bingham, chairman and secretary at NRR, said “I know that Alistair had always been fascinated by the wild west and he’s always been a huge fan of westerns. This is what inspired him to build Tranquillity.”
The project first started in 2005, those were the early stages, the member numbers were low and they were building Tranquillity one step at a time. The club continued growing and growing with more and more members joining as the news of the town started to come out. People became interested from the website and people who had heard about the town wanted to hire it to start making films.
Michael Bingham said: “We’re always on the lookout for new projects. We’ve had different cameramen and different film makers to film some of them. Sometimes it's been for their own projects, sometimes we’ve had students who’ve come up to film for some of their student work. We’ve even had visits from STV and BBC.
“Sometimes we’ll have people come up to make a film. Then they’ll edit it themselves and send us the link to the preview of the film or give us a premier date of when it will be uploaded on YouTube. We’ve even been able to make and upload our own films.
“I’ve written a couple of our films. There was Vengeance 1, then followed by a sequel last year. I started writing the script for Vengeance 1, then we decided it needed a little more detail added to it, so Alister helped co-write the rest. This was a concept that I thought would make a good idea for a western story. That was filmed a couple of years ago then we had the sequel filmed last year. It premiered on YouTube last August”