The Lake in the Sky, a short film by 14-Year-Old Award-Winning Filmmaker Caleb Reese Paul

Caleb Reese Paul, a 14-year-old award-winning filmmaker & actor has just launched a Kickstarter campaign for his latest and most ambitious film, The Lake in the Sky.

The Lake in the Sky is a Coming-Of-Age/Drama short film: Warren’s 16th birthday is rapidly approaching. In a final attempt to grasp onto his fading childhood, he sets out to create a “memory movie” of his late father. His comatose mother, obsession with the past, and haunting invention all come to a critical head on his birthday weekend.

What if you could relive any memory?

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, and (at times) dark sequences rooted in character. Contributions to the film are fully tax-deductible.

Caleb says “

The idea for the film started with a feeling that I think a lot of people can relate to; the need to capture memories. When I originally began the development of the story, I wanted to specifically target this – make it about preserving the small moments in life. What if I created a character that was the embodiment of that – too stuck in past memories to be present in his current reality? This was the foundation the film was built on. If you want to remember something, don’t take a picture. Live it in the moment.”

“When you take pictures of things you want to remember, you’re relying on your phone to remember it for you instead of your brain. You’re removing the responsibility from your brain to remember things. You become reliant on your phone instead of yourself to remember memories. This is the groundwork of the film.”

Caleb made his first professional short film,

The Nexus, at age 11 at the height of the pandemic, which swept the 2020/2021 Festival Circuit. Since then, he’s made multiple award-winning short films, garnering accolades such as Best Narrative Film, Best Young Filmmaker, Best 1st Time Director, Best In Show, and more.

In addition to being a filmmaker,

Caleb is also a professional actor. He has played Jeremy Sisto’s son on the Dick Wolf CBS prime-time hit TV show, FBI, for the past 4 seasons. Other credits include the Broadway National Tour of Finding Neverland, A Christmas…Present, and the HBO series The Other Two. This summer, he’ll appear in the new Walking Dead spinoff show, Dead City.