What’s Up for the Weekend
A weekly travel and events snapshot around the state
“…promoting people, businesses, and events that deserved a bigger audience.”
Nine years ago, before YouTube took over the way we watch things, a couple of colleagues from my time at Channel Seven and I set out to build something new. We'd worked together on a show that hadn't quite landed in Victoria, and we wanted to try a different format, a weekly digital bulletin with the pace and feel of Time Out or a broadsheet, but built for the screen.
I produced it. That meant client outreach, content, and the paper edit, alongside presenting and voiceover. Our team was three, a cameraman and an audio operator who also cut the episodes, and me. We ran it on the side of our day jobs, and it was genuinely fun to make, a great learning curve, and proof to ourselves that we could produce something of that caliber without a network or anyone behind us.
We'd hoped, early on, to partner with an airline and have it play in flight, in lounges, or in tourist hubs where people were arriving. The bigger dream was each state having its own version, playing for arrivals, including travellers coming in from overseas. In the end life got busy and the project wound down, but the feedback we valued most at the time pointed to the format's real flaw, weekly content dated fast.
To date, it's still one of my favourite projects I've ever been part of creating. It combined my love of travel, events, and tourism with connecting city and regional Australia, and at its heart it was about promoting people, businesses, and events that deserved a bigger audience.