Origins of The Kid Trotter Video Series

The Trip
Early 2014 we decided to travel to Argentina with our 4 year old girl for 3 and 1/2 weeks. As per our pre-child travel travel days we wanted to jam the most into the trip. So we put together an iitinerary which would rival with most of the intense backpacking trips of the past. People thought we were crazy to take a child so young on a trip so intense. It turned out to be a very successful trip for everyone, primarily through the planning of little pockets of down time, especially for Enya.

The Experience
Travelling with kids can be testing at times, as when travelling to foreign lands things do not always go ‘right’ ,so you have to manage the situation and the needs of the children at the same time. However watching kids adapt to local cultures and customs and the amazement in thier eyes watching 'alien things' unravel before their eyes, is very rewarding. Argentina in particular was for us the first trip that Enya was old enough to fully appreciate and participate in, right from the planning stage! Watching her pick up and use worlds of spanish, interact with local kids was the icing on the cake.

Birth of an idea
During this trip we took loads of photos and videos (as we all do of course). One day we got an email from Enya’s school teacher asking if we could send a few photos and explain how the trip was going, as the rest of the children were curious. They had many interesting questions like ‘Did she get sick on the plane’ , ‘Was it hot’, ‘Is she eating lots of ice cream’ : )

These videos were shown on our return when Enya and the Mom trotter did a presentation on the trip for school. The kids were extremely motivated and abounded with questions. Kids are naturally curious and inquisitive.

After the success of the presentation and videos we began to search the net and TV stations for any professional videos dedicated to kids and families that address this innate curiousity - we were unable to find anything other than some very tourist orientated videos.
We decided to tackle the idea ourselves which slowly evolved into The Kid Trotter. Our project was to focus on foreign travel as a cultural experience. The wealth of experience and knowledge you can get from staying with, eating with, and speaking to locals. This far outweighs anything you could get from trip advisors top 5 things to visit in city X. We understood it was a massive project but we have most of the skills required and most definitely have the passion.it was just a question if we had the time, and could fit it into already busy schedules.

To give the project some spice and we decided we would travel by/with scooters. It would introduce more fun and possibilities in our filming.  After playing with a few titles we decided upon ‘The Kid Trotter’ …i.e. the young globe trotter. (Ironically in French trotinette is the word for scooter! ... and we are producing the series in both english and french)

Taking shape.
As the cold winter settled in in december 2014, the wanderlust became too great to ignore and we set about planning our next trip. We finally decided on a country that was on our ‘bucketlist’ for quite some time : Vietnam. We decided this would be the trip we would dedicate to our ‘Kid Trotter’ project. Enya was now 5 and had warmed to the project and was motivated to document her(our) travels. Before departure we filmed a quick little teaser which got alot of hits on youtube which further motivated the troups. I did alot of research and started connecting with people on twitter and discovered an amazing travel community and great interest in family travel. There is an abundance of blogs and written content on family travel but with little or no (professional quality) video content. Our idea  was further validated.

Vietnam
This trip was an amazing experience for all 3 of us - as you will see on very first series of videos. This was for many different reasons which I will address in other blog posts. We had a non stop 21 day trip - filming just about every day. True, it was tiring and we as adults especially tried to have our wits about us and be clear in what we wanted to film and why. However it was diffocult as it is such an amazing country/culture that there was just so much to film and share with future viewers. The fact that we both have alot of camera experience, training & qualifications, especially with the Mom Trotter's 20 years experience with TV, helped alot.

Launch
After getting back we had about 1 TB of film to go through which to sort alone is a job in in itself. We began editing and soon realised that we have enough good footage for 10 x 10 minute episodes. We expected it to take the duration of the 10 episodes to get into a groove and find a style that we were happy with, but also something that the target audience would respond to. You will notice that throughout this series we have tested and tweaked several things/ideas.However we have very early (and with alot of late nights) come to a format/style that we thinks pleases : fun, light, informative, musical... The format may well be tweaked in the future dependong on the feedback we get form you guys so please do email, facebook, comment or tweet us your comments.

Check our Video section for all the videos that have been released to this date.

Future
We are now planning a trip around the world (funding permitted) to produce 7-8 episodes on 12 different countries. We have a shortlist of countries down and are exploring options. We will obviously choose very different countries/cultures, as the more different each can be the more we can accentuate the differences in cultures, people, lands & food and the more value we can provide for viewers.

EP 0 : The Kid Trotter Family Travel show - Vietnam teaser

Just back from Vietnam and with backpacks full of video footage and heads full of amazing memories we produced a small teaser to annouce the fact that our very first series was in editing...