mercer

Did you have any problems sending the money?
Best Regards,
Hakuna Matata

Yeah right, $500, is it made out of gold...

But seriously. I'm afraid at this point, for a lot of people on this forum, the truth is irrelevant. I almost believe the entire story is made up. No disrespect intended to Tim but I don't really know anybody here, and there are really only two truths we know... Tim fell for an African Western Union scam and Ebrahim, if that's his real name, used the same words (names) for both his login and password and then told everybody on the forum. And someone close to him, all fingers point to his grandson, has stolen people's clips and used them in his own reel, but was smart enough to never actually say they were his.
If any of this is true I wish everyone the best because it sucks. I get why Tim would take Ebrahim's word for it considering he is a well respected member of this forum. And this is so strange that I even can believe that this is actually Ebrahim conversing on the forum now and he has zero knowledge of any of this. This whole debacle seems like a case for Peter Sellers. 
Also, has anyone noticed that Zach Goodwin has been eerily silent lately... Just sayin. 

Ed David... Never knew a cause with half-baked facts he didn't like since 1981.

Nice images, what's your setup like?

Western union , best deals guaranteed. 

Especially since Ebrahim looked way hotter in the pictures he sent me. 

I have two 5d mkiii's I need to sell very fast. I'm currently in Dakar (Senegal) shooting a documentary about my great-grandfather who was an african king, and I've lost my travellers checks, and my credit cards refuse to work here. If you send me 500$ (US) for one, or 900$ for both I will send them for free. This is an EOSHD only offer for longtime posters only as I don't trust other people. Send me an PM if you are interested so I can give you the western union wiretransfer details. Act fast, once in a lifetime chance (I will throw in two extra batteries and chargers, and two Komputerbay x1066 128mb cards for each camera)

Haha. You can't even keep a straight face. 
Please do not close this thread. The truth must be told. This could be an international crime syndicate.

I'd like a stylist
and a cinematographer or focus puller, ha
 

Or that Andrew has multinicks and is keeping the forum alive during the summer.

You are right, of course. It's just that an original, organic story needs to be structured. It needs to be edited, rewritten, polished, trimmed. But the wild and uncensored idea must be first. The content. Even meaning and message come later. Or everything becomes a boring mess.

It's hard to rig, hard to handhold, and it's hard to change camera settings like ISO and WB in the moment because of the touchscreen menus. The built-in battery is no fun, and neither is the need for IR filters. Beautiful organic image though. 

... All on the next episode of Soap. 

... All on the next episode of Soap. 

Loving this discussion going on! I am very grateful to hear different perspectives especially if they meander too!
Off topic here but speaking of writer/director combo, I'm blown away at Richard Linklater's process for "Boyhood". To have a general structure of the story written for the 12 years, but then to pretty much produce a short episode each year and to have had pretty much full cooperation from cast and crew over the 12 years, pretty astounding stuff! They couldn't sign a 12-year contract either, as anything over 7 was illegal. He must have made an amazing pitch to IFC, getting them to commit to that process.

Yes, and we must distinguish between the formal conventions a screenplay has to have to meet the expectations of the professional buyers and things like "the arc of suspense", motivations, narrational economy asf. 
The first part is now facilitated by Word and some specialized screenwriting apps (Syd Fields book must me so old, he probably only knew white paper and a typewriter). As for the other stuff, it seems to be a basic truth if you analyze films or novels. Field kind of reverse-engineers the films, counting minutes and pages and how they correspond to the stages of the developing conflicts.
Now what his scholars can do is make check marks at the end of page ten, twenty asf to see if they established the conflict, reached the plot point at the right pace. 
If a conventional form is what you are after, you can of course do that, but imo you can NEVER invent something with a rigid structure in the back of the mind. This is simple psychology. If you are obsessed with formal criteria, you will never create something original.
This collective subconscious is what bad films, formalistic genre films, "movies" transport. You have (according to Jung) little worth as a human being if you move with the crowd, avoid painful individuation (a Jungian term) and always choose the blue pill. There are other valuable ideas, like the masks we wear (directors should exploit that with their actors) and our shadow. Stanley Kubrick cited the shadow in his Full Metal Jacket. A film, btw, Syd Field would have had a nice challenge in making the structure fit to his rules ...

Well said. Syd Field was a little unpopular for awhile because a lot of writers thought his "paradigm" was to formulaic when in reality it was just a basic truth about screenplay structure. There are a million ways to tell a story, but if your screenplay is not structured properly, your narrative will fall apart. Of course, not all screenplays would benefit from that paradigm... Especially short screenplays, but all screenwriters will benefit from understanding structure. 
I also recommend reading some Carl Jung, his ideas on the "collective subconscious" and "archetypes" are extremely valuable for a storyteller.

The last paragraph in that Facebook response is the most telling...
"But you already know that you're powerless right now to do anything to regain your money from someone you know nothing about his/her name, whereabouts, age, occupation, phone number, nothing, and that's why you're freaking out"
It would seem as though this person is admitting that he is not Ebrahim, I think I believe Ebrahim... What would he have to gain? Unless he came onto this board years ago with every intent of playing the long con to swindle a relatively small amount of money. Unlikely. 

The last paragraph in that Facebook response is the most telling...
"But you already know that you're powerless right now to do anything to regain your money from someone you know nothing about his/her name, whereabouts, age, occupation, phone number, nothing, and that's why you're freaking out"
It would seem as though this person is admitting that he is not Ebrahim, I think I believe Ebrahim... What would he have to gain? Unless he came onto this board years ago with every intent of playing the long con to swindle a relatively small amount of money. Unlikely. 

The last paragraph in that Facebook response is the most telling...
"But you already know that you're powerless right now to do anything to regain your money from someone you know nothing about his/her name, whereabouts, age, occupation, phone number, nothing, and that's why you're freaking out"
It would seem as though this person is admitting that he is not Ebrahim, I think I believe Ebrahim... What would he have to gain? Unless he came onto this board years ago with every intent of playing the long con to swindle a relatively small amount of money. Unlikely. 

The last paragraph in that Facebook response is the most telling...
"But you already know that you're powerless right now to do anything to regain your money from someone you know nothing about his/her name, whereabouts, age, occupation, phone number, nothing, and that's why you're freaking out"
It would seem as though this person is admitting that he is not Ebrahim, I think I believe Ebrahim... What would he have to gain? Unless he came onto this board years ago with every intent of playing the long con to swindle a relatively small amount of money. Unlikely. 

We have talked briefly about this stuff before and it wasn't my intention to call you out on anything. I just wanted the OP to have multiple sides to the debate. You are correct, nothing is keeping you from writing a script without following the "rules" and breaking these rules would have zero effect on the quality of the script... But like it or not, there are rules for the way a professional screenplay is formatted. There is craft and tools to help a writer tell a compelling story. And there are writers that break those rules and still manage to write a great script.
For instance, Shane Black wrote Lethal Weapon and broke nearly every "rule" of how a screenplay should read. He used asides and crazy description, almost in an editorial fashion and, at the time, it was the highest selling screenplay ever. So there are always exceptions to the rules.
But there is a reason why most colleges who have a film department graduate their students with a degree in communications. Stories and movies are communicative in nature and honestly I don't see the point in breaking the rules you abhor just to break the rules? Learning the craft of screenwriting and storytelling is actually about communicating your ideas to the viewer. The creativity is inside the ideas and the craft helps you explain those ideas to a viewer.
Again, I am not calling you out, I just enjoy the debate. Obviously, write the script you want to write, and how you want to write it. I'll be happy to read it and interject my ideas into it... ?, but more importantly I want to see this short of yours because in the end, the script is meaningless and the finished film is all that matters... That's why screenwriters are usually banned from the set. Of course, there's an old Hollywood story where a producer tells his director that the screenplay is the most important part of a movie... "Just don't tell the screenwriter I said that."

I just felt that was a little bit of a new topic, and the "answer" was less specific to screenwriting. one of them does a 3 page treatment; another scripts meticulously, even hundreds of scenes that get thrown out, and then opens it up entirely in filming; there's my whatever way, which may not work perfectly, but feels right for now. that style is just difficult, and those strategies could help cater to the story.
the story is definitely a separate thing, but personally I would never use story structure as a tool. And you are allowed to. my films will still have raising stakes and conclusions and inciting incidents and climaxes. or maybe they kind of won't, and it will be interesting in that way. as if to make my point, not numbering page one is totally irrelevant. it could be helpful to learn story structure, but "don't number page one!" seems to be taking it a little too far. some guy just came up with that, just like the rest of this

Gotcha, I didnt get it. Apologies :/