The Lake in the Sky

Experimental / Coming-Of-Age / Drama / Sci-Fi

17 min | Digital | 1.78:1 | 5.1 Surround Mix | DCP

An isolated teenager explores the past, his late father, and unstable memory through the use of celluloid on his 16th birthday.

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Memory. noun, mem·or·y, mem·or·ies. the act or fact of retaining and recalling impressions and facts; remembrance; recollection: to draw from memory.

What if you could relive your memories - any of them? What if you had all your memories at your fingertips, all organized and at the ready, and it was as simple as just a press of a button to relive them? The Lake in the Sky explores these questions with heart and grit through the lenses of childhood, grief, nostalgia, and memory with energetic, high-concept, dark, and (at times) underwater sequences.

This project all started with a monologue - it was all about preserving the small moments in life and the instability of memory. I had seen an article a few days earlier on a study Fairfield University conducted - they took two groups of people and sent them through an art museum. At the end, they interviewed both groups on what they saw, but the catch was that they took one group's phones away. The group with phones took pictures of art they liked and moved through the exhibit as normal, and at the end, when asked to re-describe what they saw, the group without phones was able to remember much better.

Wait — people actually remember better if they don’t take pictures of things important to them?

That got my wheels turning.

So I thought; what if I created a character that was the embodiment of that? A character who could only experience lived moments and life through a camera. Someone too stuck in the past to move forward. What if I created a machine that (not to spoil too much) was a visual representation of what that person's brain might look like?

That's how I began.

Then I added a layer of nostalgia to it. Mixed media. Super 8mm film.

In May of 2023, I ran a Kickstarter campaign and successfully raised $15,000.

The Lake in the Sky is fiscally sponsored by From the Heart Productions, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping indie filmmakers get their film funded. All contributions are charitable donations and therefore are tax-deductible. More information available here.