Gnome since 3.8 has restricted the Blank Screen time to between 1 and 15 minutes, or “Never”, to disable screen blanking/locking entirely. If this isn’t granular enough, you can set other values like so:
<del datetime="2014-03-25T22:25:42+00:00">dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/session/idle-delay 1800</del>
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 1800
The value is in seconds, so here we set the delay to 30 minutes (60*30=1800). It seems that once doing this, the UI will show “Never”, but the set value is still used correctly.
There is also a “Presentation Mode” shell extension that adds a button to inhibit screen lock, but for me, I still wanted to have it automatically lock, but just a little bit slower.

EDIT: dconf didn’t actually work! Apparently gsettings is the way to go.