These are the best of times, these are the worst of times.

Yes, the technology at our disposal these days is freaking amazing.

The workstation I'm using to write this blog is the same workstation I've used to edit, composite, and color correct footage for at least five feature films and a few shorts and art projects over the last 18 months.

Without leaving my seat I can research, coordinate, promote, write, budget, perform, edit, render, composite, color, compose, mix, distribute and promote to name just a few routine activities. Much has been written about the extraordinary flattening effect this has on the industry. I particularly love what it's done to the workflow.

For those of us who are ADD (I suspect I may be though I've never been diagnosed), it's all the more fantastic. I bounce from activity to activity, tweaking a scene in COLOR one minute, jumping into SHAKE or AE to clean up a comp the next. I'm completely free as a filmmaker, artist, craftsperson, whatever, to take the action I'm inspired to take INSTANTLY.

We can work anywhere we want, we can cut in HD in the middle of camping trip if we want to. Pretty soon we'll be doing it on our phones.

Compare that to a decade ago when FCPro 1.0 was just coming out and DV was coming of age. To edit you needed to go to a post house, pay extraordinary amounts of money by the hour and work with a specialist who could only cut and wouldn't let you near the machine.... Revolutionary doesn't begin to describe it.

That's what Y2K was for me. That was the year I bought FCPro 1.0 and a DV imac (graphite). I remember how angry I was that FCPro wasn't supported on it and wouldn't start up (I found a workaround anyway).

That's when the revolution happened for me. Then I went and made Savage Island.

As an indie filmmaker who's been making movies for almost 20 years now, having spent half my career on either side of that line, I can tell you, times are good. Creatively speaking. We are more empowered than ever before.

Anyone can shoot a movie. HD camcorders are practically free at this point, and most phones can shoot video. I was at Best Buy yesterday and saw HD palmcorders for sale around $200. There was one there that was capable of shooting standard def at 600 FPS for only $500 (no kidding).

Anyone can edit a movie. Editing systems are extremely cheap at this point, some phones can EDIT video.

Anyone can distribute a movie. Thank you intertubes. That's the topic for another post, another time.

The problem of course, is that since anyone can, everyone does.

What an avalanche of product (as movies are called by buyers and distributors) has hit the marketplace over the last few years. When companies finally began seriously considering digitally acquired media for distribution (around 2002) the floodgates opened. I was an early benefactor of the new potential obviously. SAVAGE ISLAND was shot on miniDV with a puny budget.

Now, there is a host, a legion, a monstrous glut of microbudget horror in the marketplace. People are delivering surprisingly strong movies for under 10K, for less than 1K, heck, I've heard of feature budgets as low as $20. Many of the pics are quite interesting, and they sell.

Yes, they sell but in very small quantities, and at lower and lower prices. The global marketplace has opened up, has gained in efficiencies over the last few years as well. The problem however is that it still costs money to sell a movie in the marketplace. A lot of money.

On my last trip to the AFM, I was told my sales agents that it costs them between 40K-75K to sell a movie these days.

And I believe it. Any effective world market distribution company needs a large number of staff to handle the business and administrative affairs with all the territorial distributors. The sales and aquisitions teams will hit a dozen markets and festivals a year all over the world (only used to be three or four a few years ago).

50K in sales expenses is a lot more than the 25-30K they used to need only five years ago. Especially when total revenues for your straight-to-dvd microbudget masterpiece are topping out around 200K, often far, far lower.

Yup, we're empowered more than ever, great cameras, great post equipment, a powerful promotional tool at our fingertips yet at the same time the market for our movies has utterly collapsed for a myriad of reasons. As the old world collapses however, as the old model of business proves to be unsustainable, a new model is emerging. Again, a topic for another day.

These are the best of times, these are the worst of times.

And I'm loving it.