- Kelly O
With personal funds and a small grant from the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council, Blake wrote a 10-page script and set out to make the film [The Surveyor]. Not knowing any other filmmakers, he assembled a skeleton crew. “I just hired people I could find,” he says, “and I edited myself to save money.”
After Scott’s rejection and the Tacoma premiere, Blake uploaded the short to Vimeo where, a few months later, it caught the eye of screenwriter and The Stranger columnist Charles Mudede, a fellow 25 New Face. Mudede selected it for the paper’s “Short Film Fridays” and, in June, picked Blake as a finalist for its 2013 Film Genius Awards. Mudede wrote, “As a director, [Blake] is mostly self-taught. But watching Surveyor (the movement of the camera, the positioning of the actors, the sparseness of the music), you’d think he had attended film school, had an encyclopedic knowledge of westerns, and had received training as an assistant director on a number of local and national projects.”
Currently paying the bills by way of a desk job at a Seattle tennis club, Blake is continuing his cinematic schooling by soaking up Criterion Blu-rays.
See Scott Blake’s work at the Frye on July 31.
