CORVALLIS -- Peter Richardson's education at Philomath High School taught him enough to realize you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you. But it's okay to nibble.

Almost 7 years after his graduation, he was also smart enough to understand that there is nothing wrong in coming back and examining your hometown with a magnifying glass, as he was compelled to do. Or better, an examination using a more penetrating and enduring look through another type of lens -- the one on his movie camera.

The result was this now 26-year-old film director's first documentary film, Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon.

Philomath and its high school must have done a good job, at least with Richardson, because his film was selected by the prestigious Sundance Film Festival and, indeed, it made its debut in January at Park City, Utah in the 2006 festival.

Richardson's remarkable success with his first film was the Hollywood equivalent of hitting a home run on the first pitch in your first at-bat in the major leagues. For him, Park City and Sundance was like making that debut in a packed Yankee Stadium. Historic, if even on his first step, for him.

Hometown boy grows up, leaves home, goes to Notre Dame, gets a Mac. This is a coming of (digital) age story, and we're not talking about his movie. We mean him.

Richardson edited his documentary entirely on an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop -- another clue that his parents, his hometown and Philomath High raised Peter to be as intelligent as he is curious. Richardson's choice of production tools is also a testament to this new digital age, as much an evolution in the movie production industry as it is in the music industry, maybe even more. Sundance is at the same time a proving ground and a launching pad for independent, low-budget, small film production teams; at times enabling what would have been inconceivable production-wise much less financially impossible 10 years ago, one-person efforts.