Scientology is truly a religion for the 21st century and so utilizes new-millennium technology to carry out its religious mission. To that end, the Church moved into the multimedia age with establishment of state-of-the-art film and audio facilities at Golden Era Productions.
Set on 500 acres in Southern California, Golden Era Productions produces audiovisual informational and training materials for use within Scientology Churches, as well as films and public service announcements centered on Church-sponsored social betterment activities and humanitarian initiatives.
The focal point of Golden Era Productions is its 80,000-square-foot film studio. The main sound stage rises more than three stories, with an interior the size of a football field.
Final production of the religious audiovisual properties filmed at Golden Era Productions is accomplished in its cutting-edge postproduction facilities, which include six fully digital editing suites. To produce any required digital effect, Golden Era’s special effects department harnesses more than 500 computers with the computing power of 6,360 billion calculations per second.
Moreover, all religious film and video musical scores are produced and mixed in-house in Golden Era’s recording studios. The audio division facilities were designed to meet every production need: from an 84-track recording studio large enough to accommodate an orchestra, to a 112-track 5.1 cinema surround-sound mixing studio.
Golden Era Productions is responsible for the production of all L. Ron Hubbard recorded lectures on Dianetics and Scientology. The lecture studios feature one-of-a-kind echo chambers, used in the restoration and reproduction of Mr. Hubbard’s recordings and built to Golden Era's specifications.
Additionally, there is an entire building devoted to recording translations of scriptural and other religious materials, where a bank of digital studios operates 24 hours a day. It is here that a team of foreign-language voice talent records Mr. Hubbard’s translated lectures on Dianetics and Scientology in 16 languages.
Cutting-Edge Film Restoration & Preservation
David Miscavige supervised the restoration and release of L. Ron Hubbard’s filmed lectures and an exclusive interview with Mr. Hubbard. The first to be restored was the Clearing Congress films, a series of six lectures delivered in Washington, D.C. in 1958. The next release was the only filmed interview of L. Ron Hubbard, An Introduction to Scientology shot in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1966. The final restoration, completed and released in 2008, was the Classification and Gradation film—recorded at the Scientology headquarters in Sussex, England, in 1965.
The condition of these films had greatly deteriorated over the ensuing years. The project to restore and preserve them was carried out by a 70-person team in Golden Era Productions’ film lab. More than 620,000 frames of the original negatives were digitally scanned, meticulously cleaned by hand and restored. The result: Scientologists and the general public can experience this seminal lecture series and the exclusive L. Ron Hubbard interview for themselves.
