We've been waiting for the tide to turn for many years now. From almost the beginning of cinema, it's been a business for most. For a century, this amazing art form has been owned and operated by corporations focused on the bottom line. This inevitably means that films look the same, sound the same, are the same. Creative experimentation is discouraged. Beauty is an afterthought. Story is a reproducible financial equation.

And it's not just that cinema has been too expensive, too difficult, too time-consuming for the young artist. It's that the medium operates almost exclusively out of one region, one city. If you want to make movies, you have to go to Hollywood—or so it's always been.

So what's to become of the common artist, drawn to the great potential of the cinematic art form, but squelched or rejected by an industry that sees no profit in his endeavors? This artist has never had a chance. Never had the opportunity. Until now.

We've been waiting for the tide to turn for many years now. In the seventies, we saw the studios shaken by a changing culture that began to deem them as irrelvant. Hollywood turned to young talent, the so-called "film school generation" to save them. These young artists—like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian de Palma—the rare few, plucked out of obscurity by Hollywood, were given an awesome chance and succeeded at revolutionizing cinema—while also restoring the studios to power. It was counter to everything filmmakers like Lucas and Coppola wanted, but there was no alternative. Hollywood needed fresh, artistic talent, but that talent needed the resources of Hollywood even more—production equipment, facilities, and of course distribution.

By the eighties though, times had changed again. The studios were once again at their height, but the introduction of the video camera would open new doors for aspiring filmmakers. Now, the ability to make motion pictures no longer required expensive film. While video could not compare in quality, it did the important thing—it could tell stories in a visual, moving medium. That was useless though, unless you could do something with the footage you shot. Hollywood was still a necessity.

And then the nineties came along. Home computers, digital video, editing software—everything you needed to produce a film, and it was all becoming so affordable and accessible that any high school kid could make their own motion picture extravaganza. Hollywood needn't fear though, because even as the technology improved and got closer and closer to film, there was one piece that Hollywood still had the monopoly on: distribution. And without that, those kids could make whatever they wanted, but they had no hope of showing it to anyone outside of their small circle of friends and family.

We've been waiting for the tide to turn for many years now. And in this last decade, we've seen the last straw and the weight it's placed on the great camel's back. The internet is the final piece of the puzzle. Every cinematic artist that's been yearning for the chance to make movies and have their work seen now has everything they need. The artists are out there, they have the tools to shoot their movies, the tools to complete them, and now they have a place to present them.

This is unlike any other time in the history of the medium—and it should change everything. Right now, all of Hollywood is shut down because the writers are on strike. Does this mean the end of film? Can an organized labor strike really stop the creative process?

We're at a turning point and right now every artist out there has the chance of a lifetime. Hollywood, for a moment, is powerless. You have everything you need to do what they have always done before. Now is the time. So, why aren't you out there making the greatest film that's ever been made? Get to it, before everything changes again.