Truth, Revealed.
We build safe places where people remember who they are.
There are ideas.
There are beliefs.
There are stories we tell ourselves.
But eventually every claim meets reality.
That moment, when conviction becomes experience, when faith becomes action, when unseen things produce visible consequences, is the point of truth.
The experimentum crucis.
Experimentum crucis is Latin for “crucial experiment.”
Francis Bacon described the idea and Isaac Newton made the phrase famous: the test that settles a question, the point where two explanations cannot both be right and the result shows which one is true. The idea is older than science. On Mount Carmel, Elijah put a single, plain question to the people, and it was answered.
Experimentum Crucis Media develops film and television in that spirit. We make serious, character-driven drama in which belief is tested, not assumed: stories of faith and failure, of family and land, told with the full craft of the medium and without shortcuts.
Creating media that reveals truth.
Reclaiming our words.
Stories are where a people finds the words for who it is. The words we are given shape what we are able to see, and what we are able to say about ourselves.
For a generation, the stories of rural America were stories the whole country shared. Ranch and farm families, small towns, neighbors, and faith kept plainly at the kitchen table were on the screen every week, and families watched them together.
Experimentum Crucis Media exists to tell those stories again: the lives of rural and Christian Americans, their families, their land, and their faith, told honestly and with the full craft of prestige drama. We are not here to complain or to ask permission. We are here to build the work, and let the work make the case.
“To give our people back their words, and to give them a few more they don’t even know they have.”
“If you cannot name the good, you cannot defend the good.”
For truth
We tell the truth about people, including what is hard.
For faith
Faith on screen as it is lived: tested, doubted, kept.
For care
Stewardship of the craft, of the people and places we portray, and of the audience’s trust.
For victory
We finish what we begin, and let the work speak for itself.
A dramatic series · In development
Someone moved the line. In the cattle country of Old Florida, a widowed rancher has to dig up the truth about his land, his people, and his God before the story built on top of it buries them all.
Created by Billy Ray Hunter II
Story by James Pitt & Billy Ray Hunter II
Written by James Pitt
Our flagship series, produced with Cracker Cowboy Productions.
Series artwork and original music with vocals and narration · 1:33 · Captions available in the player
The reel is a sequence of painted series artwork set to music. The vocals sing the traditional hymn “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” (words by Samuel Medley, 1775, with the traditional “Glory, hallelujah” refrain).
Music begins, a woman’s voice singing softly.
On screen North Florida.
Pine flatwoods, palmetto, and a line
a man’s grandfather once bled over.
Buck Sandlin and Math on horseback at the pens, a lone rider beyond the fence.
Math, in voice-over: “You learn to read this country. The weather, the cattle. The men that work for you, and the men that work against you.”
Young Math and Patricia work the cattle pens together at sunrise, leaning on the weathered rails with the herd behind them.
Math: “Patricia used to say the brand on that gate wasn’t just a brand, it was a prayer.”
Young Patricia leans on the rails by the gate, smiling at Math as he works the chain.
[A lone cowboy’s voice sings]
I know that my Redeemer lives,
glory, hallelujah!
What comfort this sweet sentence gives,
glory, hallelujah!
At sunset, Patricia kneels in the grass and places the reins in Math’s hands.
Math bends to kiss Patricia’s forehead as she lies in a hospital bed.
Math: “Then the Lord took her.”
Math rides out alone among the cattle through the morning fog, the fence line behind him.
Math: “I quit praying. I kept the fence lines. Let the rest go.”
Math kneels in the grass, his head bowed over his hat, while a lone rider watches from across the pasture.
On the porch at dusk, Math holds Patricia’s small pink Bible, her face in the evening sky.
He lives, my everlasting Head,
glory, hallelujah!
Math leans on a fence and watches a lone rider cross the misty field.
Math sits his horse at the edge of the pasture as a storm builds over the Big J.
Math: “Then they found a man dead on the line my granddaddy bled over.”
At the boundary line, Math and Sheriff John Hartley stand by a fallen figure in the palmetto.
Math: “Hartley asked me if I was ready to stand on it. I was.”
Shout on, pray on, we’re gaining ground,
glory, hallelujah!
Math kneels in the pasture, hat in hand.
Math: “Trouble was, I was standing on a line somebody else had moved, and I walked right into it.”
The dead’s alive and the lost is found,
glory, hallelujah!
Math stands at a broken fence with two ranch hands and the cattle.
On screen “Remove not the ancient landmark,
which thy fathers have set.”
Proverbs 22:28
The music falls silent.
On screen Someone did.
[His voice rises again]
The dead’s alive and the lost is found,
glory, hallelujah!
Math gathers with the families and neighbors of the Big J, a golden retriever at their feet.
On screen CRACKER
Truth & Fire
Created by Billy Ray Hunter II · Written by James Pitt
Experimentum Crucis Media · Cracker Cowboy Productions
The logos of Experimentum Crucis Media and Cracker Cowboy Productions appear. The reel fades to black.
Founder & CEO
Born in Eustis and raised in Williston, Florida, James Pitt grew up in historic Cracker cattle country. The pine flatwoods, working ranches, horses, and cattle of North Florida are not a backdrop to him. They are the world that first shaped him.
A veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, Pitt went on to a career in film and television, with roles in James Cameron’s Avatar and Close to Home. He won Best Actor at the 2023 LA Indies Fest for Because of This, which he co-produced, and was nominated for Best Actor at the 2013 Idyllwild CinemaFest for There / Not There.
He founded Experimentum Crucis Media on the conviction that the spiritual side of life deserves the same seriousness in drama as the psychological or the physical. He writes and produces CRACKER: Truth & Fire and is attached to play its lead, Matthew “Math” Albritton.
He has a wonderful wife and son, and a large, close extended family.
Production, press, and general inquiries.