At last, a hundred years after the first cinemas open, the costs of movie-making technology have fallen to the point where the public can make quality movies. This article from Yahoo! tells the story of Shane Carruth, who with a few thousand dollars, lots of time, and a crappy computer took first prize at this year's Sundance. This is great news to those of us interested in destroying the "culture industry" and bringing the means of cultural production back to the masses.

"The image quality and, to a large extent, the performance of what you can get today is comparable to the best products that were available to professionals at any price no more than, let's say, 10 years ago," said Charlie Russell, senior product manager at editing software heavyweight Avid Technology Inc.

I think in a few years Blair Witch Projects will be commonplace. What's especially promising is the flattening of the learning curve required to use sophisticated computer graphics software. The costs associated with certain scenes, props, and effects will be dramatically reduced once a personal computer can represent them with in a realistic manner. I can see amateur film makers being able to turn an empty studio apartment into an actual movie studio; the computer will generate the backgrounds, props, and even "crowds" needed for crowd scenes.

One of the Sundance films out there is about the amateur movie making hobby itself. I can't for the life of me remember its name, though.

The question is, when do we make a Kairosnews movie?