SLFS Interview – Alessio Summerfield: Writer and Co-Director of DEV DIARY

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DEV DIARY screens Wednesday, July 19 at 5:00pm at the Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar Blvd, St. Louis) as part of this year’s St. Louis Filmmaker’s Showcase.

Ticket information can be found HERE

Although St. Louis game designers the Coster brothers — Adam, Sam, and Seth — have a reputation for developing projects quickly, they have spent the last two years working on only one game. Sam’s dream game, “Crashlands” has helped him battle cancer as he struggles with Stage 4B lymphoma.

Alessio Summerfield, co-director of DEV DIARY, took the time to answer questions about his film for We Are Movie Geeks in advance of it’s screening at the St. Louis Filmmaker’s Showcase.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman

Tom Stockman: What was your filmmaking experience prior to DEV DIARY? Is this your first feature-length documentary?

Alessio Summerfield: Prior to DEV DIARY James Reichmuth and I came from two different backgrounds. I’d been working in commercial video production in Atlanta, GA for some time, prior to moving to the Midwest, and James’s background was almost exclusively theatre, performing arts, and event planning. We came together over a love for video games and the rest came soon after.  Dev Diary is both our first feature film and first episodic project, since outside of the film festival circuit DEV DIARY is an on-going series that is currently available on Steam, VHX, Vimeo On-Demand, Amazon Prime Instant Video, and will be coming to more platforms by the end of the year. The film festival-exclusive feature film is a cut-down version of the first season of the show.

TS: Did you grow up with an interest in movies?

AS: Ever since I was 7 years old I knew that I wanted to make movies. I’ve sincerely never even considered another option. I think my exact phrasing 21 years ago was “I don’t care what I do for a living, as long as I can pay the bills and have time to make movies.” I blame it on my father’s HBO subscription in the 90s, my mother’s collection of foreign films (we’re Sicilian), and my obsession with telling stories to my friends.

Who are some documentary (or narrative) filmmakers that you admire?

AS: In no particular order: Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch, Sofia Coppola, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Luc Godard, Edgar Wright, Alain Resnais, and Liliana Cavani.

TS: How did you meet the Costa Brothers?

AS: We met the Coster brothers after doing a few smaller-scale shoots for DEV DIARY early on (it began as an idea for a anthology series for YouTube). After filming the PixelPop festival and spending some time with Carol Mertz and Happy Badger Studio in Maplewood we were referred to meet with Sam and Seth Coster. What started as a 2 hour interview for YouTube turned into a 6 hour conversation, and the next day we had a pitch deck and a plan for a full-blown documentary.

Have you been involved in the local gaming scene?

AS: I wouldn’t say involved per say, but James and I were definitely interested in the local gaming scene. I’d heard from a few friends of mine that there was a really engaged and robust independent game development scene in St. Louis, and so James and I investigated and found that they were some of the most approachable, friendly, and creative folks we’d met in the city.

TS: What about their story made you think it was worthy of a feature film?

AS: I think the fact that the Coster brothers were essentially a 3-man studio hustling together a massively ambitious game project really resonated with our 3-man production team (at the time). Sam’s extremely taxing and emotional journey battling cancer throughout development absolutely contributed to our urgency as well, though. I’d be lying to you if I told you that I didn’t stay up late a few nights, scrubbing through home videos of Sam Coster’s life, getting teary eyed more than a handful of times throughout the documentation process. We legitimately didn’t know if he was going to make it for several months of our filming.

TS: What were some of the particular challenges you encountered making DEV DIARY?

AS: For James and myself, the number one challenge was dealing with a project this long. Honestly, the festival-exclusive feature film edit of the story was refreshing to piece together after editing 6 22-minute episodes that made up the whole first season of the serialized version of this story.  Telling a story for that long and keeping it engaging was never something that we’d done independently, no matter how many series we worked on as freelancers or what-have-you. That and working with no budget, but also being free enough to be present for filming at any point during a year and a half can get quite taxing. The easy answer to how would be: we just did. Haha.

TS: At what point during filming was Sam diagnosed with Cancer? 

AS: So, Sam was actually diagnosed about a year and some change before we came on the scene, and was seemingly recovering, but was then re-diagnosed again a few months before we made contact. We’d vaguely heard of their situation through the grapevine, but didn’t know the full extent of Sam’s illness before our first day at his home.

TS: Tell me about collaborating with your co-director James Reichmuth

AS: Have you ever had a relationship with another person where you hardly have to communicate with words and you can still manage to convey great amounts of information to each other? It’s a lot like that. I honestly don’t know why it took us so long to meet, but it’s been a wild ride ever since James joined Forever an Astronaut in August of 2015.

TS: How has DEV DIARY been received so far?

AS: Considering we don’t have a marketing budget, we’re still working other jobs, and we essentially made the whole thing with less than the number of fingers you have on one hand, I’d say it’s been received rather well. 38 five-star reviews on Amazon Prime, 20 perfect reviews on Steam, a write-up in The Boston Globe, and a festival premiere at the world’s largest video game themed film festival in Washington D.C. seems like a good run, right? We’ve submitted the festival-only feature film edit to quite a few more festivals outside of MAGFest 2017’s Games on Film and the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase, so we’re hoping the film will have some legs and an audience around the world.

TS: What do the Costa Brothers and their parents think of the finished film?

AS: I hope that they enjoy the time-capsule that we’ve created for them, but, realistically, I’d imagine that it’s quite difficult to watch for them. They were so close to losing their son / brother, so I’d imagine this isn’t a film that they just throw on on Saturday nights to show their friends and family casually, you know?

TS: Would you like to continue making documentaries or do you have an interest in narrative films?

AS: I never really had an interest in documentary, and yet the last four years of my life have been spent working on documentaries. Between documenting a masked vigilante working in Atlanta, GA, documenting St. Louis’s own street-artist wunderkind, Peat “EYEZ” Wollaeger, producing the 2014 season of Feast TV, and now having completed DEV DIARY, I’d really like to work on something that isn’t documentary. Our production company, Forever an Astronaut, got started working on short-form fictional narrative film, and fictional film is what made me want to be a filmmaker, so I think we’ll be pursuing a few projects in that vein (feature / short) in the very near future.

TS: Tell me about your next project?

AS: Besides entering post-production on the second season of the DEV DIARY series (covering Happy Badger Studio and their game SmuggleCraft out of Maplewood), James and I are in the process of working on some fictional series concepts with some screenwriter friends of ours, producing a short that I’ll be directing, pitching a fictional feature concept to some investors, and working with a few local artists to produce some more music videos this year.