It’s the final day of the NFL regular season, and playoffs will begin soon. We have a feeling that means people are going to be seeing a lot more of those new TV ads that Scientology leader David Miscavige revealed to his audience at the IAS gala in England in October, and then we’ll see which one gets featured at the Super Bowl in February.
We’ve told you that of the three new ads, the one featuring actress Wyni Landry is very different than other recent Scientology commercials, as she looks at the camera and utters, “In my day to day life, when people find out, people are like, ‘Wait...wait, what? You're what?’”
A series of other people then pick up that theme until at the end, they reveal that they’re talking about being Scientologists.
It’s a clever ad, and more creative than the usual “mystery sandwich” that Scientology offers. But every Scientology ad has one thing in common: It never actually tells viewers anything about what Scientology is, and it certainly doesn’t go into its controversies or allegations of abuse.
And that’s why we are pleased to bring to you today a dynamite new offering from Mark Bunker, who recently has returned to activism with an AI focus that is yielding amazing results.
Think of it this way: If Scientology ads actually told the truth!
We asked Mark about what it took to put together this gem…
I'm glad you liked it. It was both fun and grueling to put together. It was great fun to see images come to life as “talking head” videos, and then see performances come to life with the addition of dialogue. Grueling, because of the daunting task of animating each line of dialogue and finding the right character and voice combination to make the piece work with the time it took to generate each clip. There’s a time limit of 10 seconds per clip, and each clip takes 12 minutes to generate. You never know until the clip is finished if the lip sync will work, and if the performance lives up to your hopes.
There's a lot of experimentation and a lot of rejects, but when it works there's this giddy sense of excitement and awe at how well AI has understood just what I was looking for. An example is when Slappy Miscavige is talking about XENU blowing us up in a volcano and apologizes and says, “forget I said that.” The timing is perfect. Or the slack-jaw look he has talking about getting pneumonia, which adds to the humor of what I wrote into the line.
I tried a “text-to-speech” approach for one line and immediately saw that this method would never work, so I turned to ElevenLabs and used their Voice Changer to bring the script to life. I recorded all the dialogue for the script, and then found what I hoped would be the best voice for the characters. Slappy is one I love. And I love the way my turbaned character says “Kentucky.” That's my performance but the way “he” says the line still delights me each time I see it.
Because of the 10-second limitation for videos and the time it takes to make each one of them, I would combine lines of dialogue onto one clip. A good example of this is in the video of “Suzie” who asks “Larry” to demonstrate his control of MEST. I gave no direction in the creation of the video, but AI flawlessly was able to take my voice track and gave Suzie a performance that made me laugh and applaud! Her performance is exactly what I hoped it would be. I still had no idea if it would work until I cut it together, but it is one of my favorite moments in the video, even though I find Larry’s performance far too wooden. He still comes off as appropriately pompous, and finding the proper voice went a long way in covering up the video’s limitations.
Tony said the characters look like me and Miscavige and he is right, but he didn't seem to spot all of the characters also played by Tory Christman. (Can you spot which ones?) I used models of the three of us to be able to generate characters that lived in the world of the original Scientology video. I didn't want to clone the real people from Scientology's ad but just give a sense of what I was parodying.
I hope you enjoy this. The idea came just as Kling AI announced an upgrade to their video-generating software which made this project possible. It is leaps and bounds beyond what I was able to create for “Xenu's Playhouse.” I've got plenty of ideas to move forward.
If you’d like to go deeper behind the scenes, I am going to do a member’s only look at the creation of this spoof. You can become a member at my YouTube channel to join in.
If you'd like to help me keep my enturbulation going strong, I'd love it if you'd make a donation which along with keeping the lights on will help me gear up to make bigger and better projects. Thanks so much!
https://venmo.com/u/xenutv
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=XXR7WDEKGB282
https://cash.app/$XENUTV
— Mark Bunker
A special treat for our subscribers
Today subscribers will receive episode 99 of our special podcast series, “Group Therapy.”
We discuss the week’s revelations with our gang of jokers and degraders, including our transoceanic friends Pete Griffiths and Alex Barnes-Ross, and in Colorado the genial Bruce Hines!
It’s all the enturbulation you could want!
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For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:
Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea
Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time
Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology
Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain
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'Hubbard taught us to think for ourselves and then taught us what to think'. Hilarious and spot on.
Mark Bunker's new video is great! I hope it gets a lot of love and success!