Richard Blackburn

My career began thirty-five years ago, on-stage and in front of the camera as an actor and dancer. I was a scholarship student at Les Grands Ballet Canadiens. I began my professional career with Le Groupe de la Place Royale in Ottawa, where I also appeared as 'Jerry Nines' in David Fennario's Nothing To Lose and performed Bolero with the Béjart Ballet. I gradually moved backstage and behind the camera as I transitioned from cast to crew. Eventually, my intrigue in the creative process of storytelling became a passion for the creative processes of storymaking. Aristotle established the first principles in Poetics. Syd Field's Screenplay, the best storymaking manual so far, presents them on the first page in a headquote from Joseph Conrad. "To The Reader - My task...is to make you hear, to make you feel and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything." As an independent producer of film, television and interactive media for the past twenty years, my job is to ensure audiences see and hear, as clearly as possible, what the writer wrote and what the director shot. As a Canadian filmmaker, my commitment is that the sights and sounds of the stories I help make reflect the beauty of Canada, its people and peoples. Both as an artist and artisan it is my focus and it is enough.