Soon after I learned how to write at about the age of six, I started writing stories. I was thrilled, because I had just discovered a way to capture the ideas in my mind and put them in the real world where other people could see them.
One story I wrote circa 1969 was about an orphan boy who stowed away on a space ship so he could get famous and find parents to adopt him.
Now, here I am all these decades later, trying to get my SciFi movie, Strands, turned into a movie. (Well, not just a movie. All formats.) It definitely has a full circle kind of vibe to me. It certainly hasn’t been a straight line between then and now, that’s for sure.
Between that first story about the space stowaway boy and college, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about stories. I was more preoccupied with sports, work, school, and girls, not necessarily in that order. It wasn’t until I went off to college and had my first experience with the ol’ wacky tabbacky that I came up with the germ of this idea for an epic SciFi movie. And then life went on and turned my focus to earning a living and my other business projects.
But even though my activities revolved around other things, the Strands movie was always there floating around in the back of my mind, rotating into consciousness whenever anything reminded me of it. It actually took me at least fifteen years before I came up with the name ‘Strands’. Before that I never really had anything more than a placeholder, and as soon as the words Strands came into my mind, I knew that was the title I had been waiting for.
It finally came to me after I had more fully developed the nature of these lines running through space that people figure out how to traverse. I imagined pulses of energy bursting out of a collapsing singularity in a two-dimensional line, forming the strands that can be found throughout interstellar space if you know how to find them.
It wasn’t until many, many years later that I finally learned about the Einstein-Rosen bridget that proposes that that is basically what happens. I’m sure I’ve taken a lot of poetic license, but I like the idea that the story is based in science. I see the Strands move as taking a fairly serious approach to building a world where the science is plausible — along the lines of Avatar.
A core idea of the movie is I didn’t want to just wave away the faster-than-light (FTL) issue in this movie. So the central plot of the seminal movie is how they manage to break through the lightspeed barrier in a believable way. This forms the framework or the fabric of the world that sets the stage for all the spin-off stories that Strands is intended to spawn.
It was many years after I decided on the name that I actually decided to write the screenplay. That was back around 2007 or so. I wrote the screenplay, and sent it off to a few contests and to a screenplay feedback consultant. I didn’t win any contests, but the reviewers didn’t say it was terrible. They liked the story and think it has a lot of potential. But it’s ambitious. Sprawling. Tough to squeeze into a single movie.
A few years later I took another run at the screenplay and tightened it up to the version I have now, which is still very heavy at 132 pages.
If I’m being perfectly honest, I know it isn’t great. My dialogue is stiff and action descriptions are too verbose. I would like to do more re-writes and hone my the screenplay myself, but I know that even if I were to do that, the chances of my screenplay ever seeing the light of day through the usual channels are zero. I don’t have the skills, or the time or money to learn the skills to produce a movie like this, so what’s the point of writing the screenplay, if it will never become a movie.
So my calculus is that the only way the Strands Movie will ever be made is if I could find people to collaborate with on it. Those people might have better dialogue writing skills than me, or the ability to create 3-D graphics, or the ability to bend AI graphics generators to their will. What I really want to do is just be the conductor of all these individual collaborators to create a self-sustaining and infinitely scalable content creation project. Just stories after stories after stories, each one intended to entertain, educate, and illuminate the audience.
So that’s the broad vision of the Strands Movie project. I’ll start getting more into the details of this project as the Dane of Earth channel continues. I’m not sure if people will gravitate to this project or if I’ll ever be able to get it off the ground. But by God, I am going to give this the ol’ college try and see if we can finally launch this project into orbit.
It’s about time.
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