Real World Productions

Global Underwater Explorers

Florida based Global Underwater Explorers are are the world's pre-eminent underwater research, exploration and education group.

It's founder Jarrod Jablonski and his team, hold numerous world distance records for exploring the famed Wakulla Springs underwater cave to a penetration of over 18,000 ft at depths approaching 100m (330ft). Along the way he and his exploration partner George Irvine have literally re-written the book on diving equipment, gear configuration, procedures and decompression.

Over the past two years Real World has been proud to assist GUE's efforts with a variety of new media solutions.

When Jarrod sought to publish the first of GUE's advanced diving manuals, he wanted to ensure the latest up to date information and the widest reach to GUE students all over the world, but found that in this regard at least .. it was GUE that was out of it's depth.

GUE image

Enter Real World's Dean Laffan, who as a GUE member was intimately familiar with the subject matter and was in the perfect position to apply Real World's core skills of e-Publishing to the new manuals.

After being written in Florida, the manuals were PDF'd to Real World's specification and FTP'd to Australia for the value-add process.

We then added the bookmarks, hyperlinks, page navigation, colour coded internal and web links, then finally optimised the file size for web download and secured them for online distribution.

The two publications "Getting Clear on the Basics - The Fundamentals of Technical Diving" and Beyond the Daylight Zone - The Fundamentals of Cave Diving" became some of the most successful publications in eBook history, selling thousands of copies each.

Diving in caves and breathing mixed gasses can be a highly technical area, so while printed form is fine for some applications it was decided that a comprehensive video program on GUE's famed 'DIR" style of diving was required, thus was born the idea for the 'DIR 2004' DVD project.

Once again it was a US-Australian co-production with the content filmed in the US by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Marc Singer and the edited tapes sent to Real World for DVD authoring.

Clocking in at a whopping 8.5 hours of content, Real World mastered a 3 disc box set of DVD5 and DVD9 discs. Custom motion menus disc 1, disc 2 and disc 3 were built for all discs, chapter points were inserted and a stunning animated sting was constructed as the startup action of the discs.

Finally, to promote the release, Real World fashioned a web based 'movie trailer' showcasing the contents of the discs. For highest compatibility, the trailers were authored in hi and low bandwidth Quicktime and Windows Media formats. They were also designed to funtion as viral marketing tools with an invitation to buy the discs by clicking on the live link url inside the movie.

On announcement of pre-orders, the GUE online store went into meltdown requiring GUE to quickly double their existing replication run. Following the extraordinary success of 'DIR 2004', GUE has commenced work on the next release in this ongoing educational series.