Hello Friends,
My name is Dane Christensen (alias Dane of Earth). I’d like to invite you to consider becoming a member of my cool new project designed to transform the media industry, disrupt the crypto meme coin landscape, and usher in the age of AI-generated media. It’s called the Strands Movie project.
You can peruse the pages of this website to get a pretty good idea about what this project is about, so I won’t go into it at great length here. Suffice it to say that by combining screenplay collaboration, a robust game layer, generative AI video production, and crypto crowdfunding, we are developing a completely new form of organization in which all participants earn their share of the collective value of what we produce together.
What I am going to talk about in this blog post is closer to home. I’m going to tell you a bit about the creator, and my approach to this project.
My vital statistics are that I’m a 63 year old man at the tail end of my 25 year career in web development and digital marketing. Over that time, I worked at a bunch of Silicon Valley high-tech startups. And in between jobs I did contract work for more companies than I care to remember, ranging from mom-and-pop e-commerce shops to multinational corporations.
With a degree in Psychology and most of my work experience in food service, I barely squeaked into the Internet industry around the turn of the millennium, and I basically remained at the bottom of the food chain ever since. Don’t get me wrong, I did a yeoman’s job for my employers. But the truth is, for a large chunk of the time my heart wasn’t really in it.
I always just wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’m an idea man.I’m an idea machine! That’s just how my brain works. I am constantly looking at the world and thinking about how things could be better by combining people with information, tools, resources, and plans to solve identifiable problems.
Unfortunately, there was always a key ingredient in this mix that I never could get my hands on — investment capital. After all, gaining that information, tools, and resources, not to mention peoples’ time, all cost money.
Not that I let my circumstances stop me. During most of my 20s I was determined to start the first multi-restaurant delivery service. Way back in 1982, I knew that service would be huge one day. Today there are multi-billion dollar businesses in this space (DoorDash, UberEats, GrubHub), but in those days, that kind of service simply didn’t exist.
I attempted to launch that service three different times under three names (Munchy Mobile, Dining Haul, and Everybody’s Delivery). But I wasn’t able to raise enough investment to keep the business going through to profitability, and it ultimately went down in flames.
It took me a few years to regroup from that devastation. But eventually I became intrigued by the concept of business incubators, and I attempted to launch one called Worldwide Association of Virtual Entrepreneurs (WAVE). The idea was very similar to YCombinator, which was launched several years later. Again, too early. WAVE was soon washed away.
I launched two other businesses during my 30s’: MentorNet, an Internet training and web development company which struggled to make a profit, and a DotCom called Absolute Authority, which was doing great, but imploded along with the DotCom bubble in March of 2000.
That’s when, pushing 40 and completely out of resources, I took my first professional job, got married, raised a family, and basically toed the line. For years and years I worked those long Silicon Valley hours while battling brutal Bay Area traffic to the distant bedroom communities where I could (almost) afford to live.
I pushed the limits of my brainpower to teach myself HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, MySQL, web server management, web analytics, SEO, paid search marketing, marketing automation, graphic design, video editing, and countless applications around all of these skills.
At work, I was known as the guy with the versatile skill set who could serve as a translator between the sales and marketing teams and the developers or tech support.
Now it seems the industry has chewed me up and spit me out, and I’m scrambling to find a way to survive in this Orwellian dystopia most of us find ourselves in.
But don’t shed a tear for me. I believe that being squeezed out of my established livelihood is the best thing that could have happened to me.
As it happens, technology and society are finally catching up to where my mind has been focused for a long time.
The advent of AI, the memesphere, and advanced collaboration tech are now enabling aspiring entrepreneurs with few resources, like me, to develop businesses in which the most important element is the creative ideas themselves.
So I looked back over all the projects I’ve tried or thought about over the years, and processed about which one I’d really love to try and also lends itself to our current times. The more I thought about it, the more I found myself excited about the prospect of reviving my old Strands movie idea.
I originally came up with the basic premise of the movie way back in 1981. It was one of my first big ideas. But I had abandoned the Strands project because I was so busy just surviving — and because I had a stack of other projects that I thought were more viable. I knew that the odds were exceedingly remote of getting any screenplay picked up by Hollywood, let alone a high-concept, big budget sci-fi adventure. I just couldn’t afford to invest my time in it.
But now I have the time to invest in it (whether I can afford to or not). I’m not an accomplished screenwriter, and I have little experience in the filmmaking field. I’m just a guy with an overactive imagination and an epic story to tell.
What you see on the pages of the Strands.movie website is the product of decades of contemplation, and a few weeks of concerted effort. But I know that the only way this movie is going to get made is through the collaboration of creative people who bring all the talent, skills, and resources that I lack to the project.
I’m optimistic that the financial support that will attract those collaborators will materialize shortly. It has to, because otherwise, I am so screwed!
And God help us all if an exciting and purposeful project like the Strands can’t garner some support.
But enough of negativity. I believe in the Strands project, and I’m going to give it all I’ve got.
So throttle up!
We’re about to blast off for the moon!
No, not the moon. To the stars!
And to the galaxies.
And beyond.