Revolution!

Did you know you are living in a time of revolution? And that you are one of the revolutionaries? How, you say? Well, every time you shoot some video on your phone and post it on Facebook or YouTube or Instagram or any one of dozens (hundreds?) of other social media or Internet platforms, you've just written, directed, produced and distributed a film.

For the first time in history anyone can use film to tell a story and you can tell it directly to potentially millions of people without ever having to ask for equipment or money. This is a very different world to one that existed not so long ago.

Film can be an expensive business. One of the Pirates Of The Caribbean films holds the current record with a cost of $378 million. The Hobbit Trilogy was made for more than $600 million! You could run a small country for that much. Even in the early twentieth century film making was expensive because the camera technology was rare. Having access to film-making technology kept the power to make films in the hands of big studios.

But camera technology continued to evolve. In the late sixties, smaller, handheld cameras meant film makers made a whole new breed of films that revolutionised the kind of stories being told, stepping away from artificial glitz and glamour and diving into the streets to tell stories that were closer to the lives of everyday people. In the eighties, video cameras took a giant step away from costly, awkward celluloid, meaning families could easily shoot home movies and put them straight into the VCR (ask your parents) without processing film or setting up projectors. Suddenly, everyone's lives and stories were on camera.

Nowadays we've come to expect everything to be caught on film, from the banal to the newsworthy. And of course, we have the Internet - the greatest film distribution tool ever invented. So...let's say you're somewhere between posting videos of your cat online and approaching Village Roadshow to fund your epic feature. Let's say you'd like to tell your story about living in a world that doesn't get what it's like to be hearing impaired, or about making your way to school through a landscape that presents a daily obstacle course for wheelchair users, or about how your sister makes the world a better place because of her spectrum disorder not in spite of it, or...okay, you get the idea.

That's right, Revolutionaries! You have the power. You have the technology. You have the means of distribution. You also have only a couple of weeks left to submit it to the Focus On Ability Film Festival 2017. So get cracking. Viva la revolution!

Enter here by June 30.