THE REASON IM TRYING AS HARD AS I CAN. A message from Chad Calek ________________________ Hello, my friends. Ive received two emails this week from two different people that asked me why Im promoting the A BLOOD RED SKY DVD pre-order release so hard, in which I wanted to give you all the most honest answer that I can, as the answer is not as simple as you might think. To those who would say, You just want to sell as many DVDs as you can to make as much money as you can, while I absolutely have an appreciation for the financing that it takes to make (and keep making) independent feature films, anyone close to me or my team will tell you that A BLOOD RED SKY holds an importance much greater than simply making money. Besides that, to steal a line from Macklemore, If Id done it for the money, Id have been a fing lawyer. The honest answer as to why Im working as hard as I am to get the word out about A BLOOD RED SKYs DVD release, is because as a young child living in Alvin, TX, my Grandpa (who lived with us at the time) sat me down after little league practice to have a talk with me about fate and destination. I wasn’t really sure why he wanted to discuss these things with me, but I remember his words well enough to fairly accurately paraphrase what he said. He was discussing his purple hearts that he received in WWII, while talking to me about what it means to be committed to a cause. I loved hearing his war stories (especially when he got his medals out), so whenever he started down memory lane, I was all eyes and ears. After many vividly painted tales of bullets and bad asses, the tone of the conversation changed. Grandpa became very serious, as he sat at the end of the bed, starring into his palms of his hands for what seemed to be several minutes. He eventually lowered his palms and took a deep breath, just before turning his head to look at me with a forced smile that lacked the conviction to conceal the sadness behind his eyes. I didn’t know what to say… so I didn’t say anything. I just sat there quietly. “At least once in everyone’s lifetime, they’ll get the chance to do something special,” he said. To be something more than ordinary. To leave a mark on the world that will forever matter.” Whether or not I fully understood his words as a child, what I could clearly understand, is that my Grandpa was trying to give me something very important. “Most people will miss that chance, because they just don’t believe they could do something extraordinary,” he said with a crack in his voice. “You believe in yourself. You don’t run. You try. And you try hard too. Because that chance will not come around again. So no, it can’t wait. You’re not promised a minute in this world. So when that chance comes to do something special, you drop everything in your life, you go for it and you give it everything you have. You don’t want to be sitting around at my age thinking about what could have been. You can’t get anything back. That’s the hardest lesson. You just can’t get anything back. You hear me, son? You try hard. This conversation haunts me still today, as the following afternoon, I returned home from school to see my Grandfathers body being pulled by firefighters from our burning house. As it turns out, just after taking his morning medications, Grandpa had fallen asleep in his bed with a cigarette in his hand, in which nobody was there to wake him in time to avoid the smoke and flame. And just like that… he was gone. The man who’s name I’ll forever carry as my own, in the blink of an eye, had been reduced to ash. And with that loss, my mother lost her father, the country lost a decorated war hero… and I lost my best friend. Indeed… you can’t get anything back. Although I appreciated our final conversation at the time, fate and destiny would transcend his final words from advice to gospel, in which I promised myself that I would keep my word to him. Should I ever get that chance in life that he referred to, I would drop everything, and as he instructed, I would do everything in my power to be a better version of myself. To do something special… something extraordinary. 25 years later, as I stood just outside the massive wooden doors of Alnwick England’s Chillingham Castle, I thought about Grandpa. As a documentary filmmaker, I had been a part of many projects that I had felt passionately about… but A BLOOD RED SKY was different. As ridiculous as it may have appeared to even members of my own team, A BLOOD RED SKY was nothing short of my attempt to change the world. Yes... I said CHANGE THE WORLD. Im know. I must be crazy, right? I mean, who am I? Im just some dude with a camera, right? I agree. But what I also am, is a believer in the theory that the human mind has the physical ability to alter reality, thus giving us the fate that we fear, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, the destination we so desire. And by the time I left Chillingham, I was committed, at all costs, to putting this theory to the test in a way that had never before been attempted... much less documented. So how did I become a believer in this theory? With one swing of a baseball bat. In high school, I was a pretty damn good baseball player that very rarely ever struck out. In fact, going into my last home baseball game of my senior year, I had only struck out twice throughout the entire season. But this game was different, as this was the only high school baseball game of mine that my father had ever attended, which is why it was extremely important to me that I did something to make my father proud. In my first three at bats… I struck out three times, which absolutely tore my heart out. I didn’t understand. The ball just seemed so small… like I was swinging a tennis racket at a pebble. I was in my head, and my worst fears had manifested. In those first three at bats, I had completely lost my ability to hit a baseball. Then something happened. I poured a cold glass of water on my face, shook it off and told myself to envision what I wanted to happen. Smell the grass. See the pitch. Dig in with my back right foot. Transfer the power through the bat with full extension... and rip the fing cover off the ball. A calm came over me. It was like being in a tunnel. In sports, they refer to this as being in the zone”. The pitch came. I swung. I heard the crowd. My father smiled as he watched his son hit the longest home run of his high school career. Just like that… it happened. Now, if you’re reading this, it would be easy to say, “he was due” or “he just got lucky”. I’m telling you right now that it wasn’t luck. It wasn’t event talent. It was mental focus. It was seeing what I needed and focusing far beyond belief. It was mentally making it happen. I know this. I’m not guessing. I felt it before the pitch. I felt it during the pitch. I felt it when the bat cracked against the leather of the ball. This was not an accident. This… was the power of the mind. And throughout my life, I kept having these moments where I was aware that something else was at play. What I would need, at any given time, would occur through a focus that transcended belief into reality. And to be clear, I believe we ALL have these moments, but most of us simply aren’t aware of it because we’re not focused on it. Throughout our lives, most of the time, we just consume and move, only stopping for the briefest of moments to reflect. I’m absolutely guilty of this. But I have noticed that if you slow down and take a look at where you were mentally right before the most profound events in your life occurred, I believe you will all see that your mind is fate’s architect. And the one consistent place that I noticed this process in action was during paranormal investigations. Through my own experimentation, it became very obvious to me that we are the architects of our own experiences, which would explain why some people experience incredible amounts of paranormal activity, while others experience nothing, because we each experience what we want to experience. And these are REAL experiences we have. I’m not talking about figments of our imaginations. I’m talking about the mind creating legitimate physical events and experiences. And in return, those experiences effect everyone and everything in their path, creating a “collective” consciousness. These are my beliefs. This is my theory. This is what A BLOOD RED SKY is about. It’s about finding the line between reality and fantasy. It’s about recognizing our mind’s abilities, and more importantly, our mind’s true potential if we can harness those abilities. And as a film, A BLOOD RED SKY is the documenting of a highly controversial experiment that was designed to either prove or disprove my theory. We truly went into the entire event with no expectation, other than to travel to the most haunted location in the world (Chillingham Castle), where we would follow the steps of the A BLOOD RED SKY experiment, and for better or worse… experience and document the results. What occurred, was as fascinating as it was terrifying. What occurred changed my life and lives of all involved, from the cast to the crew. What occurred… is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. And the true beauty of the film is the inclusion of the viewer within the experiment. If that sounds a bit mysterious, after seeing the film, you will definitely understand. In short, A BLOOD RED SKY is why I’m an independent filmmaker. It’s why I made the choice to walk away from mainstream filmmaking. Because you will never see a Hollywood studio make a film like A BLOOD RED SKY. Why? Because when we began shooting the film, there were a million physical film production variables with absolutely NO set ending, as the entire point of A BLOOD RED SKY is that we had absolutely no idea what the results of the experiment would be. Needless to say, major studios don’t pay for anything unless the outcome is predetermined. Ever. Period. Major studio do not take chances. There’s a formula to their success, which is why you see so many “franchise sequels” and franchise re-boots”. This means that filmmakers like myself, who truly want to push the boundaries in an effort to create change via the medium of film, will find no quarter on Hollywood and Vine. Does that mean that I don’t care about money? Any artist who cold-handedly dismisses the need for financial backing and return on investment is truly insane. If you don’t care about how your film looks or whether or not anyone ever sees your work, then no… you don’t need money. But if you respect the craft of filmmaking, recognize the need for financial backing and want to have a career as a filmmaker, your creative spirit better find a “middle ground” between between the desire for artistic freedom and the need for commerce, as without a team of investors willing to back your vision, then your epic film that’s in development will eventually be exposed for what it really is… an idea without financial backing. And guess what? There’s no shortage of those. So how did I make A BLOOD RED SKY? The “chance” that my Grandpa talked to me about came in the form of opportunity provided by an incredible group of people who were willing to financially back the documentary, having no idea what the outcome of the A BLOOD RED SKY experiment would be. And these people are NOT billionaires with tons of cash to throw away. They are some of the most hard working, caring and loving individuals I’ve ever known. And together, we took the chance. We put all our chips on the table… and we gave it everything we had. Because no matter what the outcome was, A BLOOD RED SKY was the first of its kind. Nothing like it has ever been attempted, created or documented. It was a chance to be “more”. A chance to do something extraordinary. A chance to create real change. So will A BLOOD RED SKY change the world? I honestly have no idea. That part of the story isn’t up to me. That’s up to you. But whether it does or doesn’t change the world, for those of us that lived the A BLOOD RED SKY experiment, it’s already changed our our views, our actions and the story of our of lives, which will hopefully one day become our “legacy”. I also know from our touring, that in 77 different cities across the United States, Canada and Australia, A BLOOD RED SKY has already had a profound effect on many people who took the time to experience everything that A BLOOD RED SKY has to offer. And now that the film is coming to DVD, I sincerely hope that you will take the time to not only watch A BLOOD RED SKY, but to also take the experiment yourself, which is why as a “pre-order” version only, we’re releasing the “A BLOOD RED SKY: EXPERIMENT EDITION” DVD, which includes the detailed instructions and the additional video assets to conduct the A BLOOD RED SKY experiment from anywhere in the world with your friends and family. Why are we only offering the “EXPERIMENT EDITION” DVD as a pre-order? Because we simply want to say “thank you” to everyone who shares our excitement to release the film on DVD, as we can’t wait to see the results of your experiment, as that is also a part of our ongoing research. So to those who ask why I’m promoting A BLOOD RED SKY as hard as I am, the answer is because I believe this film can change lives. Because I believe A BLOOD RED SKY is something special. Because when the show is over and the lights go out... you cant get anything back. Because I promised my Grandpa that I would try hard when my chance came. Which is exactly what I’m doing. Im trying as hard as I possibly can. I believe A BLOOD RED SKY is worth your time, your attention and your support. With that being said, if you want to see A BLOOD RED SKY, if you want to support our efforts to create change, if you want to support truthful independent documentaries that push the boundaries in search of hard answers to difficult questions, you can pre-order the “A BLOOD RED SKY: EXPERIMENT EDITION” DVD by visiting aghtelevision OR by visiting the direct “A BLOOD RED SKY: EXPERIMENT EDITION” DVD pre-order page by CLICKING THIS LINK: aghtelevision/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26 Also, if you havent seen the red band trailer to A BLOOD RED SKY, you can watch it by clicking play on the video posted below. In closing… I just want to say thank you once again. Thank you for your attention, your time and your interest in or work, as your support truly means the world to all of us. Much love and all the best. - Chad Calek Director, A BLOOD RED SKY
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 08:55:22 +0000
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