Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Jerusalem in Utah County?


Yesterday, I had an opportunity to visit the Goshen, UT BYU movie lot of Jerusalem.  I doubled down on Tylenol and laced up my tennis shoes tight because it was a lot of walking but oh, I wouldn't have missed it for all the world!  As many know on my bucket list is a trip to the Holy Land~~well I got an amazing preview right here in Utah!  Our Natural Resources staff was allowed to take a tour of this ~ we were there for three hours and I could have stayed another three~~ We saw sites where many of the previous movies on the Savior's life had been filmed as well as those built for a future movie on His life.  A good walk away we saw "Gethsemane", Garden Tomb, Golgotha which was incredibly built up on a cliff.....As our tour guide/sculptor showed us, much of the set's walls are made of sculpting dense Styrofoam and then placing some special cement over it.........this looks like real stone, or rocks..they expect to have this functioning for at least another 20 years and will keep adding to it.  The pillars on the porch of Solomon's temple was at least 1/2 a football field long, Solomon demanded a type of designer stone that common people could not use, all the stone used in the temple had to be carved around the edges like a special frame on them, the pool of Bethesda and the dusty road to Emaus ....  it was so incredible and like stepping back in time, the narrow little streets with doorways we had to duck to go into, the big thick wooden doors, aged with rusty hinges, the room where they filmed the raising of Jarius's daughter.....the balcony where Pilate looked down on the Savior.....the well where the Savior talked with the Samaritan woman...Our guide told us that the directors would walk all over and a lot of inspiration was given to where a set should be built and how..........the gnarled and twisted trunks on the olive trees in Gethsemane consisted of a process that was taught to the sculptors how to achieve, and they look so real!~~As we prepared to leave, they told us that tours were coming to an end for a long time now because of the filming schedule ~~ so we felt very fortunate and grateful we were able to see it. 

2 comments:

Cathy Bubert said...

Sounds awesome!

the Horton Hurricane said...

That is so cool. Just reading this I can totally put a picture in my mind of that place