Terrestrial Films are our above water missions which we get stuck into every few years to learn new skills, fine tune ones we already have and generally make something a little different to take a break from diving and challenge our ever growing team of experts. Due to our wish to produce complete underwater documentaries there were certain skills and challenges that we had to face in order to be ready for that leap into television. One things for sure, fish don't talk much so sound recording, mixing and narration were all things that we had to master.

The first was Bharat, The Chariot of Knowledge, a two part series about the road trip of 4 ACE lads down the Grand Trunk Road in the North of India. The road passes through the Ganges Basin the Waggha Border with Pakistan to Calcutta, now called Kolcatta, on the East Coast. We bought a car, the Ambassador, an Indian classic and made our way down this perilous route, a total of around 2000 km passing through many of India's greatest cities and holy sites, from the Sikh Golden Temple of Amritsar through Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, the capital Delhi, the Hindu sacred cities of Allahabad and Varanassi onwards to Bodghaya, the birthplace of Buddhism and Parsanath, the center of a Jain pilgrimage.

This momentous trip threw up challenge after challenge. There is no such thing as the middle of nowhere on this route, around 40% of India's billion strong population life in the Ganges basin and the road was in disrepair often taking ten hours to travel 150 km; this was the last great pilgrimage down the Grand Trunk Road of old as the India Government have contracted a German company to lay thousands of kilometres of super highway leaving behind the India of old and moving India into the future. Although this improvement is a necessity for the growth of this incredible country it is sad to see the end of one of the world's oldest pilgrimage routes.

We approached Bharat head on with four people and vowed to produce the whole film with no outside help. Marcus van Nierop, aka Hempi, Toby Melunsky, Stuart Sutton and Chris Clark all put there strengths together to face this outrageous project. And they pulled it off with flying colours to the surprise of many friends, family and colleagues. Making that leap from underwater cameramen to film makers was a huge moment. The presenting was the hard part, being on the other side of the camera, a complete 180. Then we had to get stuck in and get the shots and you will see for yourselves that Bharat is heaps of visual candy doing great justice to India and the India way of life. Hempi wrote most of the music although some was recorded live on location. That is amazing, he basically wrote 2 albums of music to back up 2 hours of documentary. So this trip and the ensuing edit was really a trip into sound recording and sound production, a huge learning curve.

So join us on a trip of a lifetime, play cricket with the kids, worship in the holy rivers, handle cobras with the authentic snake charmers, get lost in crowds of colour and emotion and drive down the most amazing road in India, watch Bharat, The Chariot of Knowledge.

The second is a current project, as yet without a name. It follows the legendary Plymouth to Banjul Rally, 8,000 kilometres of Europe and Africa in a crappy old car worth less than 100 pounds. Like all our projects at ACE Marine Images this one was about getting our hands dirty and getting in amongst it. We believe in taking part, being in the events that make the film. If someone is up to something worth filming we'll do it with them to get the real on the spot feeling for our viewers.

So we put together Rally ACE, our new team of adventure seekers and budding film makers. Once again with Stuart Sutton as the producer and motivation behind the trip and Chris Clark directing the new five man crew, this time with Andrew Keeler, Allan Pedersen and Dominic Reid as key cameramen, rally drivers, sound technicians, web experts and photographers, amongst other things.

Having gained so much knowledge into film and particularly sound, from Bharat, we re-equiped ourselves with High Definition cameras, Senheiser shotgun and radio lapel mikes, plugged ourselves in, forgot to learn how to fix cars, and headed off into never never land. We thought we would make it interesting so we took two crap cars, a Peugeot 205 and a 1973 VW Camper Van named Betsy as our support vehicle. The only support vehicle in history to break down 8 times before we reached the start of the rally.

The rally is said to be a charitable event where the cars are auctioned at the end in Banjul, auctioned they were. This gruelling trip took us through France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, and into The Gambia, groundnut capital of the world. It was a hard trip with some of the teams moral at breaking point all the way, there's bloodshed and explosions, desert and sea lots of cars and even more sand. There was more drama on this road trip than anyone could have expected, not one puncture though, amazingly, in our 40 car group, very odd.

A hugely important film with loads of great banter, vastly improved sound, our usual top notch visuals from a different angle and more importantly a great team building exercise for producing a series of films about the MV Trident technical diving explorations.