Rise of the “Renonsence” Man
Writer, publisher, filmmaker, composer, Scott Blurton is a modern-day “renonsence” man - jack of all trades, master of none, average in most.
Born in the picturesque City of Salmon Arm and raised in the much less picturesque City of Enderby (we have a drive-in!), Scott Blurton has dedicated his life to a single, all-encompassing idea.
“A person’s reach should always exceed their grasp”
- Some old dude (I couldn’t be bothered to look it up)
Well, that and making his wife happy by taking out the trash on Thursdays. So it’s really more like two principles. Ok, I really should also add giving his wife joy and happiness for the rest of their lives so it’s really three principles. But that’s it, that’s all I got!
By these three principles, Scott Blurton has endeavoured to live his life, forever on the edge of awesomeness. He wanted to become a novelist, so he spend four years writing a novel, then realized that it was (a) terrible, and (b) foolishly written on loose-leaf paper so he abandoned it and he started on his true magnum opus. Written over the period of a decade, Evermore: Call of the Nocturne was his attempt to write the greatest novel in the history of the English language (suck it Chaucer!) by combining the literary genre with the super-awesome explosive blockbuster film genre. Since its publication in 2012, Evermore: Call of Nocturne has globally sold more than 25 copies and only five of those were by his mom!
In 2014, Scott Blurton decided to take his talents into politics and ran for Ottawa City Council. He was defeated by the largest vote margin recorded in the history of Ottawa city politics but that defeat was really a victory (no, it was a defeat) for it provided the inception of an idea that would consume Scott Blurton for the next five years. This idea, that municipal politics is incredibly silly yet incredibly serious, would be the perfect subject for a microbudget film.
Undaunted by his defeat, Scott Blurton wrote a script that he knew could never be made. But once that script was completed, he started to figure out how it could be made. The cost of digital camera technology had dropped dramatically, affordable non-liner video editors came on to the market, and oodles of subject matter experts began providing their expert advice for free on YouTube on a variety of technical subjects, like directing, film editing, visual effects, on so on. Scott convinced his friends to volunteer their valuable free time to film, record audio and act in his small film. They filmed on nights and weekends for three years, from 2016 to 2018, Scott, his friends, and professionals working in Ottawa’s vibrant microbudget film comedy worked hard to complete principal photography.
Since 2018, Scott Blurton has been engaged in the long post-production process, almost completely by himself. His work has been stymied at every point by technology and education providers giving him more control over his over his own film. Apple added detailed colour grading tools to Final Cut Pro so Scott had to learn to colour grade, Izotope made professional audio cleanup tools affordable with RX7 advanced, so Scott had to spend months learning how to clean up dialogue. Edward Instruments made foley audio easy with its Edward Ultimate Suite while BOOM library and Soundsnap made professional sound editing inexpensive so Scott had to spend months learning and applying sound design. Native Instruments made the world’s greatest music controller, while Spitfire Audio made orchestra music affordable and Guy Michelmore’s Thinkspace Education made it understandable so Scott had to spend months learning music theory and creating more than an hour of orchestra score to give The Canvasser the sound that it deserves.
And so here we are. The Canvasser, started as a simple pie-in-the-sky idea in 2015, nears completion. An impossible dream, soon to become reality. And while it won’t be greatest film of all time, it is evidence of what can be accomplished when people’s reach exceeds their grasp and it will be a milestone of microbudget filmmaking. While it has consumed more than five years of his life and will never make his budget back, The Canvasser has transformed Scott Blurton into a “Renonscence Man”, a man able to learn and apply any skill, no matter how poorly, to get his film to the screen, showing what is possible when you combine will, persistence and time.
The Canvasser is proof that for each of us, our reach will never exceed our grasp.