Dennis Dewey has lived in Utica, New York for nearly forty years. A retired Presbyterian minister, former high school English teacher, international tour guide, and professional storyteller, he has performed at venues across the United States and on four other continents.
Since retiring in 2016, he turned to a long-time hobby of filmmaking and offered his volunteer services to the Oneida County History Center. Since 2020 the History Center has premiered five of his documentaries and posted several of his "history shorts" on YouTube. He also records and edits many of the presentations given at the Center.
2051: The Return Project is his first feature film — a cautionary tale inspired by Fei-Fei Li's The Worlds I See and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Nearer. The story sprang from a dream Dewey had while on a 17-day cruise through the Panama Canal in November 2024. It began as a short story, evolved into a screenplay for a "short film," and as the screenplay continued to grow, it became clear it was to be a full-length feature.
Dewey recruited 18 amateur actors from the Greater Utica area. "I paid them with my gratitude and the promise of a cast party dinner," he says. Remarkably, none of them needed to learn any lines because he prompted every shoot — sometimes verbally, sometimes by teleprompter. "This made the editing task enormously time-consuming," he says, "but I think audiences will be astounded at how good these actors are and at how readily the dialogue flows."
The film was shot with an iPhone 13 Pro and an iPhone 15 Pro using RODE transmitter mics and edited entirely in iMovie, with some CGI from Freepik and stock footage from Pixabay, Pexels, Vecteezy and Pond5. Set at the fictitious Humanistic Artificial Intelligence Lab in Palo Alto, California, the film was shot on location at MVCC Rome Campus, SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Marcy, as well as in New Mexico and Madrid, Spain.
All his filmmaking work is not-for-profit under the umbrella of his one-man production company, Apostasis Films, and seeks to benefit local non-profit organizations.