The Experience- Short Film Cast List

Shooting in late Spring/early Summer in East Texas (Longview area), this 10-minute religious thriller is looking for cast and crew.

If you are interested in auditioning, follow the instructions below.

The Experience

A short film by Scott Link. A young married couple is on what is supposed to be a relaxing camping trip when the skeptical husband is thrown into a situation he can’t explain.

Cast:

The Husband– This annoyed skeptic met the woman of his dreams, married her, and then she found religion. Twenty-something male. 2 days.

The Wife– A recent convert to Christianity, this young woman just wants a relaxing weekend camping trip with her husband. Twenty-something female. 1 day

The Local– He’s country and proud of it, and he likes to fish.- Middle aged male. 1 day

The Deputy– Not much happens in his jurisdiction, and that’s the way he likes it. He’d rather be fishing at his favorite spot. Middle aged male. 1 day.

To Audition:

Email a resume and headshot to scott@scottlinkmedia.com. You will receive further instructions.

Crew Call:

We are also looking for several crew positions. These are volunteer assignments, and you will likely work multiple roles. We need Production Assistants, Assistant Directors, Audio, and Grips. We will be shooting outside with some very nice equipment. We also have some interesting practical effects to accomplish. You can get some good experience on set, but it will be hard work. If you’re interested in helping out, email scott@scottlinkmedia.com

Details:

–This is a Christian movie, with Christian themes.

–This is NOT a paid gig. There will be food and water on set, and you can request a copy of the finished short film for your reel.

–We will be shooting in the Longview, TX area over 2 days. We will start late afternoon on a Friday, into the evening, and finish up by lunch on Saturday.

Find out more about me here. Email with questions: Scott@scottlinkmedia.com

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What Makes Something Go Viral

Seems like every week there is another viral post. Dresses with weird colors, kids or animals doing something funny or something else makes the rounds. People from all different circles of your life are posting it.

I’ve only ever been attached to one thing that went viral. It was the “Wrong Worship” video. The church I was on staff at did the parody, and one of the guys I worked with threw it on his Youtube channel to show his friend.

The next day the video had over 10,000 views. By the end of the week it had been stolen, put on “Godtube” and had hundreds of thousands of views. (The video was initially stolen from Youtube and posted there without attribution. That’s a whole other topic. As is the existence of “Godtube” in and of itself.) And the Youtube video was just a little behind that one. In no time the video had been seen over 1,000,000 times. Even now you can find posts where people have translated the video and reposted it. There’s another pirate copy with almost 300,000 views.

No one had a clue that would happen. The content struck a chord. People shared it everywhere.

What makes something go viral? It’s a combination of timing and interest. Content gets shared, and some sort of tipping point is reached. Enough people are sharing and seeing it that new audience members consider wit worth watching AND sharing as well. It’s the social aspect of social media at play. My friends liked this, several of my friends shared it, I should watch it.

Making that happen is very hard.

Think about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Once it finally reached the tipping point, there was maybe a couple months of viral video all over Facebook, over $100 million in donations, 28 million likes and interactions, and 2.4 million videos of people dumping ice water on their heads. There are several articles on why, but from what I can gather it was these factors: important cause, easy to do, social, it had a bandwagon aspect, and a few celebrity participants gave it enough exposure to tip.

The Ice Bucket Challenge had been around for a while, even making appearances on national TV. This Time article credits the start of the ALS version of the challenge to Florida golfer Chris Kennedy on July 15th, 2014. 16 days later the video challenge had reached baseball player Pete Frates who is suffering from ALS himself. He had a huge network, and it took off. By the next Monday the ALS Association had seen donations from over 300,000 new donors. And it was viral.

Did Kennedy plan this? No. Did our worship team expect it? Nope. But it happened.

Want to make your own content or idea go viral? Make good content, put it out there. If it’s good, people will share it. If things go well, it could take off. It may not take off quickly, but if it reaches that tipping point, it will blow up. If it doesn’t, then those who see it will be impacted.

There’s no secret formula. But it happens every week.

#wearewitnesses

This was rolled out at church today. I’ve already posted my 3 sentence testimony and challenged friends on Facebook. Tomorrow, I’m going to post on twitter an challenge some people over there. You should do the same.

What if thousands of believers were talking about their faith online? How cool would that be?

Here’s my testimony:

What’s yours?

When Tech Fails

This morning I really wanted to kick a computer. Doesn’t matter if it was the computer that was malfunctioning or not, I just wanted to kick one.

You won’t have work with technology long before something, somewhere will fail. And it’s always at the most inopportune time. At church, you arrive to find a power surge has blown an amp, or the computer you use for lyrics won’t power on. Maybe someone let the magic smoke out of that video scaler. (You know, the magic puff of acrid smoke that lets everyone nearby know that this piece of gear won’t be turning on any time soon.)

This morning we were launching a major project, one I have personally been invested in for months. It’s awesome, you should check it out, get involved: #wearewitnesses First service went off without a hiccup. So far so good. That means that the video venues also get their video feeds without issues.

Near as I can tell, sometime in the 2nd service (maybe multiple times?) something spiked through our network, and caused some disruptions. Now, I’m not an IT guy. I can make my home network function, and get most computers online, but when it gets much beyond that I’m done. Don’t ask me to spoof a MAC address or explain the numbers in an IP address. I just don’t know how it works. But about 30 seconds before the key video piece was to roll in the 2nd service our ProPresenter machine lost it’s link to Planning Center Online.

Linking Planning Center Online and ProPresenter saves tons of time. And most weeks isn’t an issue. But this particular Sunday, the presentation software locked up, and when restarted, it wouldn’t let us access anything past the song portion of the service. Restart the program, reboot the machine, nothing mattered. Later we couldn’t even re-link the entire service. The final solution was to rebuild a new playlist that wasn’t linked to PCO for the last service. But in that moment…

That moment when the lights go dark and the video doesn’t roll, and then the pastor gets up and apologizes for technical failure that no one could have prevented… You just want to kick a computer. I finally just grabbed the sermon notes and the video for playback and threw them into a part of the ProPresenter playlist we could access. That got us through the service, and the video was shown, and the pastor was able to introduce the project.

So, breath deep, service over. Presentation rebuilt and fixed. Network issue bypassed.

Except our main projectors are also on the network. It’s how you power them off and on, and tweak settings. Whatever was happening in the network wasn’t done yet. And in the first couple of songs of the last service the projectors kept shutting down. Our lighting technician had the brilliant thought to rip the network cables out of the machines, and then they both stayed on and passed signal. So two major issues in two separate services. Both probably caused by the same network issue, whatever that might have been.

It’s just a horrible feeling knowing that gear you are trying to operate is causing disruptions in worship. I’ve seen videos that look like Max Headroom recorded them playback in service. (That’s telling my age) Had audio fail to start with video playback more times than I can remember. Had lights burn out, projectors bulbs go out right before services. Had what sounded like thunder go off through a sound system when a DSP died right in the middle of a sermon. These weren’t operator errors, just machine malfunctions.

Here’s the bottom line: In every situation- God was praised, the word was preached, and people’s lives were changed.

God doesn’t need fancy tech stuff to speak to his people. Yes, we use it to enhance and communicate, but technology isn’t required for church. It’s so frustrating when tech fails, but I try (am still trying today) to rest in the knowledge that God is bigger than that, and he speaks in spite of any issues. And then I try to figure out how to prevent that failure from every happening again.