The Scientology Sea Org – Inside Golden Era Productions,
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The Scientology Sea Org – Inside Golden Era Productions,


I overheard my dad once
telling one of his friends, “You know, Krystal likes helping people.” I love taking care of people
who love taking care of people. Those are the guys I want to help. You know, we all came from
literally all areas of the globe. The thing that binds us
is the Scientology religion itself. Golden Era Productions is part of
the Church of Scientology International. We produce all the audio/visual used
throughout the Church. Films, documentaries,
public service announcements… …from literacy programs to drug education. Everything that we produce here,
it’s helping that one-on-one person. It educates them and it helps them
and it helps people – millions of people around the world. And it’s done right from here. Mr. Hubbard originally formed
Golden Era Productions to do the films of Scientology. He realized that in the modern age we live in, if Scientology were to be correctly taught,
the way it’s supposed to be, people would need to see how it is done. He wrote a core body of films
which comprise a total of 26 films and within them is contained
the basics of the scriptures… …in such a way that’s artistic and aesthetic. It’s like a visual bible for Scientologists to be
able to apply the principles of L. Ron Hubbard. These were not dry films. I mean,
these were films that were full of life and full of characters and full of examples. Welcome to Africa, Sir. And that’s why the studio exists here. First off, it’s a very large campus with a lot of
buildings and a lot of square footage. We have 500 acres of grounds here
that are absolutely stunning. Originally, before we bought it,
this used to be a resort. In fact, it was called Gilman Hot Springs. We purchased it in 1978 and we built it
into this spectacular studio. There’s over 100 different buildings here, be it the studios or the music studios
or the apartments. This is where we live. It’s really extraordinary the amount of care that
goes into making sure we’re doing well, that we have everything we need. All the way down to a personal staff dentist. Everything is in house, you have all these
facilities that you need for production. It really is a distraction-free environment
that you can just create. This is our main studio.
We call it the Castle. It’s 72 thousand square feet
of production facilities. It includes art department, costumes, make-up,
research, sets and props, construction. It has two sound stages – the largest of which is
20 thousand square feet, which is the equivalent of a football field or
four NBA basketball courts. And it’s one of the largest
free-standing studios in North America. Every single person that works here is an artist. You know, you get creative people
with creative people and you get fantastic products,
award-winning documentaries, ads and so forth. We don’t set limits on creativity. And the artistry extends
across every single department. We have 22 editing stations. We produce over 24 hundred
films and videos in a year. We have a lot of footage that comes in here. We have 140 hours of footage from
20 countries that comes in weekly. This is the Music Department
Golden Era Productions where we do all the music for all our videos,
films, ads and TV shows. In the last year we scored and recorded
and mixed over 28 hours of music – which is about 14 feature films worth of music. Making films is a hot activity.
It’s fast. There’s many, many activities happening. There’s many, many projects
going on at the same time. We don’t just do films here. We’re responsible
for the entire legacy of L. Ron Hubbard. Here is where we have his
original written scriptures that form the very core of our religion. We have a million pages of Mr. Hubbard’s
original manuscripts and his research notes – something like a quarter of a million files
for every day of every year. We’re following his chronological path
day by day, his research path. Transcribing, proofreading, typesetting. Every word matters.
Every piece of content matters. Nothing is going to be edited
and it has to be perfect. We verify every word and every comment
to make sure that it is exactly as he wrote it. There’s two aspects of this. There’s
preservation and there’s restoration. This is the audio restoration area and here we’ve restored over 2,000
of Mr. Hubbard’s lectures. He gave lectures from the late ‘40s
through the ‘50s and ‘60s and those recordings are sometimes
pretty rough to hear. [LRH Lecture Excerpt]
“About seven months ago I remember sitting back
and saying, ‘Well that’s that’…” So we do, what we do here to restore
and bring his voice out so you can hear him just as if
you were standing there talking to him. [LRH Lecture Excerpt]
“About seven months ago I remember sitting back
and saying, ‘Well that’s that’…” In doing this we had an effect
on the entire field of audio restoration – actually developing new technology
to make those recordings available. Another thing we do here,
other than produce new films, is we restore some films that
might have been shot 30, 40, 50 years ago. Film that would have by any standard
thought to be completely unable to be salvaged. And here at Golden Era Productions we have
probably the top film restoration technology in the entire world because it is {i1}that{i0}
important to us. We take this very seriously because we are actually delivering the message
from the scriptures of our Founder. The first step is analogue film. We scan it into the computers,
then we have a digital content. We’ve been scanning for almost 10 years now. Our resolution is eight times higher than HD so,
we’re actually pioneers into the field. This is like NASA level technology. We go through and we clean every frame one at a time and we’ve actually done a total of 3.2 million frames so far. And that’s the responsibility we have being entrusted with the original scriptures, is to maintain the exactness, to maintain the integrity of those documents. You could liken it to a bridge and an
engineer building a bridge. There’s an exact degree of perfection. There’s an exact standard to make sure that
that bridge is safe for others to cross. Everything we do here
gets sent to the translations unit. Right here on this property
we produce 16 languages. There’s Chinese, Russian… …Norwegian or Danish or Greek. And I think what makes us international is that our message
and what we’re doing is international. Another one of the activities the studio
engages in are international events. They’re absolutely packed with people
from all over the world. From Germany, Greece, Italy, France,
the UK, Canada, Japan, Taiwan. And the excitement starts here, right from the fist moment we start producing, all the way until the moment
when the curtain opens. It’s always quite a moment when the
leader of the Church walks on stage. The events give Scientologists an opportunity to
hear what is happening within the religion and within our social betterment programs. There’s nothing quite like it. To have that view backstage and
peeking through the curtains to see what that means to everybody – I mean it’s priceless.
It really is. It’s amazing. Within a week that event will be shown to every
Scientologist throughout the world, in their own language. They can see what the results
of their own actions are doing and how much what they’re doing
is actually helping the world. There is another aspect to this place
for me, as a Scientologist. It’s kind of personal. When I was about 8 years old I realized
that I wanted to be an artist and I realized the way to
change the world was through art. Every day that I’m working means another day
that I might keep a kid off drugs. Every day that I’m finishing a
public service announcement might mean that there’s someone
in some corner of the world that’s going to see it and
it’s going to give them hope. We are saving lives and that is
what gets us up in the morning. That is how you go to bed at night. And that is very special to us. We feel very honored to be able to say
that that is what we do. Every lecture that we restore, every film that we make – it’s part of that – it’s a brick on that bridge. It’s the pathway to a better life for someone. So, suddenly my job and what I’m doing is so much more meaningful because of the impact
it could have on someone else’s life. So, that’s what we’re doing here at Gold. We’re disseminating that good word
and that help to others�

Author: Michael Harris

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