NAVY DIVERS

This exciting new four part series follows a group of tough navy recruits training to become the navy's elite "Clearance Divers". Thirty or so applicants face around the clock diving, ruthless fitness sessions, debilitating sleep deprivation tests and endless swimming and diving assessments in a bid to make the course. From a brutal initial weeding out period, appropriately named "Hell Week", to the end of their year long training, the series follows the group as one by one each contender either makes the grade or quits the team.

In the last stages of training, the surviving candidates travel to Queensland where the remaining squad members complete their final explosives training at a bush camp on Triangular Island. Enduring very basic conditions, they handle and detonate tons of heavy duty military explosives with the additional burden of endless mud and biting insects, which helps keep up the pressure during the last phase of the course. Arming 500lb bombs while diving in near zero visibility is just one of the challenges, made even more demanding with Mal filming their every move.

The "Navy Divers" series blasts onto the ABC screen this year.

CUTTLEFISH, The Brainy Bunch

SHIPWRECK DETECTIVES

Another of our High Definition television projects was a second series of the award winning programme, "Shipwreck Detectives". In December 2004 we joined up with a team of Maritime Archaeologists working in Sri Lanka's Galle harbour, to film some of the documentation and preservation work being undertaken on the "Avondster", a seventeenth century Dutch owned shipwreck. The Avondster project team work under extremely difficult conditions, as the vessel, wrecked in 1659, lies close to the shore in the swell line, where visibility is often less than half a meter. We filmed the archeologists as they dredged up artifacts and accurately logged their positions on the wreck site.

The December 26th 2004 Tsunami, hit Sri Lanka and the city of Galle devastating the population living along the coastline and our worksite. The Maritime Archaeological Unit was badly affected, wiping away ten years of work. We immediately returned to Sri Lanka to film the devastation and to document the archeologists as they tried to locate and salvage the precious artifacts scattered around the remains of their building. Traveling by Gulet along the southern coast of Turkey, we also spent several weeks filming on another international Maritime Archaeologists expedition for the series. This time we joined Jeremy Green, a Maritime Archaeologist from the Western Australian Maritime Museum, as the team from Turkey searched for the remains of a wreck, from which a local fisherman had dredged a bronze figure. This exciting series is now available on DVD.