Here's an obvious idea for a global community connected by an internet website: a global economic crisis affects the lives around us and our "ways of seeing" life itself in the twenty first century. It's an emotional world within us all and how we FEEL affects how we see what's going on.

Obviously there is more than one crisis at hand. Indeed there are many converging, and whether we are consciously aware of them or not, they are very real. Population explosion. Homelessness. Hunger. Environmental degradation. Global warming. Deforestation. Over fishing. And the list goes on and on…as corporations take over the world and jobs are shipped overseas leaving unemployment to breed anger and despair. Marriages breakdown and associations of all sorts as we take it out on each other…and some violence begun may never end. Some take to the streets with placards of words. Some holler to be heard as others cry alone, in silence.

From many angles the pressures mount and some quietly give way to just mind their own business or do their own thing to find their own peace in this world. Some can't find any peace at all and just seethe when they see their bank statements drained, their debt rising and retirement gone. There's just no saving their savings anymore!

Some pick up a gun. Some grab their guitar. We battle the bad or do better. We create or destroy everyday.

So what unifies the different scenes of our different experiences (however fictional and well felt) could very well be a connection with strangers from around the world. A fictional website, for example, in which something brings them together on a semi-daily basis. Something that allows them to express the need they have to get their personal view out and make it shine. It may not be a pretty picture…but we'll make it move

@exilenorth lol my friend and coworker worked for Coppola then Sean Penn. He was their script reader and one of the script editors. If this ends up happening we can have him review the script. He knows his stuff.

I'm in! I got a crew. Ex-employee of Francis Ford Coppola and Sean Penn will direct my side. Very insanely creative. He was a script reader/editor for both of their production companies. I'm in Sacramento, CA! If their is too many Bay Area folks come join me!

@lolo creative commons will do nicely for this sort of thing, I suppose.

@lolo I haven't seen "Babel" or "Gonzalez iñarritu", and looking at an overview of "Babel" it looks like it is very relative to the idea so I will try to watch them in the next few days. The films "Crash", "Magnolia", and "Four Rooms" come to mind for me of course they were all based in the same locations. I think that you are definitely on to something with your ideas though.
-I also think that the stories and the characters themselves didn't necessarily have to be related to each other but the event could be what tied everything together because it changes everything for everyone, and the completely different characters from different walks of lives were all effected by a single event. This is just a thought to help with brain storming so I take no offense if no one is for it.
-Over all the biggest thing for us to remember and what I have found in making short films with little to non budget is to simplify, the more we simplify the better.

# @thepalalias about the "Under workflow, the section "_c)Scriptwriting in the cloud", i think that is as subjective as what the story will be, to who the writers are (and theirs cultural, familiar values heritage is, or isnt´, etc....) and what process would that script would take in order to be a movie (i´m mean just look at my post up there concerning Reckless idea), as this is not the classic way of making movies, we can try others tools, i think it is a if the script so requires, therefore i´m changing base on your comment as an alternative

btw your +1 on driftwood´s clouds, means "Aye"?

@lolo - Definitely, as I think it would really cheapen the experience. OR - you might consider a kind of "stream of consciousness" narrative overlay; where the protagonist recounts his experience at key points during the film. Not necessarily narrating each scene... but something simple, drawing attention and offering a voice where it will be most impactful. This would be done by someone with a good mic / sound setup. Everyone tells me I have an amazing voice for that kind of thing, but don't have the equipment just yet.

@Reckless I think they should definitely write down your idea as a potential approach, but I just wanted to clarify something about the ideas already on the table, too. :)

For my own idea (and I got the impression this was true of several others as well) the reason we are asking where everyone is from is to try to tailor scenes to take advantage of the available locales. I don't think anyone has talked about trying to exclude the available locales at this point (and each participant is free to put in requests for places they would like included before the final scriptwriter(s) start working their magic).

The reason that limiting the more technical part of the "palette" (or at least running ideas by the team) a bit has been discussed is to try to ensure that the film comes off as a unified "film" as opposed to the compilation approach we are taking with the showreels. Nobody was saying that we should use "exactly the same" for almost anything, just that it get approved first. :)

Under workflow, the section "_c)Scriptwriting in the cloud, via Celtx Studio (opensource, but cloudservice by subscription https://studio.celtx.com/#/studio/nav-pricing for the rates), "Aye" for the ones that can donate some money (by @atticusd & @lolo)"

I support extensive collaboration at the brainstorming and outlining stage, but think that there should be 1 final script writer, 1 script editor and ... well infinite proofreaders, to check for typos and such. :)

I'm not an exceptional writer myself, but I come from a family of them: practically everyone in my immediate family is published (brothers, sisters, mother, father, step-mother...) and several of them have worked at national magazines or literary journals (American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, U.S. News and World Report, Legal Affairs) and published multiple books.

Heck "screenwriting" was something we talked about when we watched movies long before I ever hit my teens. My step-dad would accurately predict the events in Swedish movies the rest of could understand (but he couldn't, because of the language barrier) based on the structure alone, or my father would talk about the subtext and "un-stated messages" of a given thriller, or my mother would discuss the role of a given event or character in making another character more or less sympathetic. I got tired of hearing "and if they'd followed a more traditional structure, this would be where act 2 begins", but I enjoyed most of the rest. :)

In the decades that have followed, it's been my experience that in fiction (especially in non-comedic genres) collaborative writing is infrequently successful (Casablanca excepted) in terms of its sense of unity and that a writer's "best friend" in that respect, is really their editor, not a writing partner.

That's why I think the role of the collaboration should be to really figure out all the places we want to go and the way we want to do it, but that the writing should have just one stylistic voice in the end. Just my two (or maybe four) cents. :)

# @driftwood hahahahh the awesome, where can you shoot something?

I can shoot stuff in Amsterdam/Rotterdam if you need some foreign storylines :)

Would this be a non-dialog film, with just a bit foley sound and music to help guide the progression? Cause the one thing that could hamper the overall quality is somebody submitting a piece with crappy sounding on-board audio and mixing that in with well recorded audio. Would be fun to make some kind of art film with a real premise but without dialog. Just something really visual that keeps people on edge.