What can you do with a road trip along the Australian coast? Quite a lot.
Active Travel follows friends Victoria, Jacqueline, Courtney and Mateo on a road trip through Australia, discovering the outdoor activities, destinations and unexpected experiences they encounter along the way. With Courtney serving as the on-camera host and Mateo behind the wheel, the trip becomes an informal guide to turning a vacation into an active adventure.
Edited as a six-part travel series, the show combines the spontaneity and chemistry of a real group of friends traveling together with a simple idea: staying active doesn't have to stop when you're on vacation.
Active Travel began with footage that almost didn't become a series at all.
HealthiNation producer Victoria Rivera was planning a trip to Australia with fellow producer Jacqueline Lobel and friends Courtney and Mateo. They saw an opportunity to document the journey and potentially create active-lifestyle content, with Courtney taking on the role of on-camera host while Mateo handled much of the driving.
When Victoria and Jacqueline returned, however, they told me they didn't think they'd captured anything usable.
I reviewed the footage and saw something completely different. There was a show in there.
Rather than focusing on what hadn't been captured, I identified what they did have: a four-person road-trip dynamic, a natural host in Courtney, a progression of locations and a collection of activities and experiences that could provide the structure for a travel series.
Working entirely from the material they brought back, I found the narrative, established the pacing and shaped the footage into six cohesive episodes documenting an active road trip along the Australian coast.
The project became an exercise in editorial problem-solving and story discovery: taking unscripted footage that had essentially been written off and recognizing the characters, structure and series hiding inside it.