Singer-songwriter Jordan Klassen will help kick off the Shot at the Dark concert series at Cantos.

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Cantos Music Foundation

Enthusiasm counts for a lot. Brock Mitchell, managing editor for the website calgaryisawesome.com, seems to have it by the bucketful. It leaps off the screen in his emails and crackles over the line in phone conversations, and it’s made manifest in the stickers that Mitchell and co. have spread around town. In person, over pie and coffee at the Blackfoot Truck Stop, the enthusiasm is as palpable a presence as the pink walls. “A lot of people looked at the stickers and thought it was a joke, but I stand by it 100 per cent,” Mitchell says, leaving no doubt about his sincerity.

As such an unabashed Calgary booster, Mitchell was a made-to-measure fit to take over calgaryisawesome.com, but when it came time to post his own blog on the site, he found himself at a bit of a loss for words. Rather than writing, Mitchell pushed aside his keyboard, picked up his handy-dandy camcorder and began what has now morphed into A Shot at the Dark, a video blog featuring Calgary’s burgeoning musical talent performing informally and unplugged in unconventional settings — book and barber shops, laundromats, bowling alleys, empty theatres and even a merry-go-round. The videos are simple, single-shot, YouTube-style affairs, framed by white-on-black quotations about music from famous people from all disciplines.

Mitchell had worked on more conventional, low-budget music videos for Michael Bernard Fitzgerald and Reuben Bullock when he started the project. The first light, guerilla style shoot with Bullock was particularly gratifying. “You bond with someone real quick when you’re waking up that early,” Mitchell recalls. “You’re hopping fences, you’re travelling together, crawling through windows to get to these barren spots. We became brothers really fast. After the video was done we had this postpartum syndrome, in a sense.”

Their second video became the first of what is now a 15-part series. “The first episode of Shot at the Dark was just me and Rueben waking through Kensington as he’s playing one of his tracks. We were going to put it online but it was like, ‘Wow, this is really fun. I want to do this for every artist in the city.’ It was so cool, just seeing someone play outside of their concert or their bedroom or a jam space. It’s that raw feeling, that excitement, every time.”

Mitchell continued to shoot and direct, and Bullock moved into a producer role. Spurred by some success and further recognition, the pair decided the next logical step was a live showcase, wherein the artists could perform for an audience and the audience could, in turn, be an integral part of the video experience. Calgary’s Cantos Music Foundation seemed like the ideal venue choice. “I wanted to give the artists an incentive, in a sense — I wanted to give them something back,” Mitchell says. “They’re coming to me to make a video and I wanted to show them how special they are and to help them move on. I didn’t want the episodes just to stack up on top of one another and be forgotten. I wanted to bring back the viewers and the musical artists and to help them move forward, somehow.”

Despite all the change and growth in our fair city, Mitchell still encounters negativity and naysayers, people who prefer to complain and plan a move to a major metropolis rather than “Moving out of their comfort zone and making something happen,” he says.

This has never been a problem for the ever-eager Mitchell. “I don’t believe in limiting myself,” he says. “Every time, my heart stops just as I’m about to put [a video] online. If I lost that feeling, I think I’d be done. If I wasn’t scared anymore, I think I’d quit, because that’s what keeps you going. You want people to feel something every single time you do it.”