TL;DR: The Dream
After twelve years of building software for others, I’m finally building the platform that will empower everyone to create.
🎬 Cinemachina is an AI-powered movie studio where anyone can turn imagination into film.
We have a week left in our Kickstarter campaign.
To honor a promise made in love, I’m offering my engagement ring as a top-tier Kickstarter reward — not as loss, but as transformation.
Because sometimes love evolves into legacy.
💎 He vowed to support my dreams. And he is — just not in the way either of us expected.
If this resonates, please visit and support:
👉 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crystaltaggart/cinemachina
What Is Cinemachina?
Imagine you have a story inside you. Maybe it’s been there for years.
A short film about your grandmother’s journey to America. A sci-fi thriller you’ve been sketching in notebooks since high school. A music video for that song you wrote but could never afford to produce.
Or maybe it’s just Tuesday night, and instead of doom-scrolling through other people’s content, you want to actually create something with your kids or friends.
Cinemachina is an AI-powered movie studio where anyone can have fun bringing their imagination to life.
Here’s the truth: The AI isn’t Hollywood-perfect yet. Your film won’t look like a Marvel movie.
But it doesn’t need to.
Because Cinemachina isn’t about competing with Netflix. It’s about rediscovering the joy of imagination — together. It’s about competing with the infinite scroll that’s stealing your evenings and numbing your creativity.
It’s about choosing creation over consumption.
You sit down with your kids on a Tuesday night. “Let’s make a movie about a dragon who’s afraid of flying,” one of them says. Thirty minutes later, you’re laughing together watching your weird, imperfect, your creation comes to life.
You and your friends have an inside joke that deserves its own action sequence. You make it. You share it. You laugh until you cry.
You finally take that idea you’ve been carrying and turn it into something — not perfect, not professional, but real.
Why does this matter?
Because right now, we’re all consumers. We watch. We scroll. We observe other people’s creativity while ours slowly dies from neglect.
But humans weren’t meant to just consume. We were meant to make things. To tell stories. To play. To create together.
Cinemachina gives you permission to be messy, to be playful, to make something just because you can.
No film school required. No expensive equipment. No pressure to be perfect.
Just you, your imagination, and the pure joy of making something that didn’t exist before.
This is why I’m fighting so hard for this dream.
Because I believe the antidote to our doom-scrolling, consumption-addicted culture isn’t another streaming service.
It’s giving people back their power to create.
Even if what they create is silly. Especially if it’s silly.
Because that’s where the magic lives.
I Have a Dream
My entrepreneurial journey began more than a decade ago when two people believed in me enough to tell the truth: I should stop pretending and start building.
One was my life coach. The other was the man who became my husband.
At the time, I was working at a Fortune 500 tech company, playing a game I didn’t understand and didn’t want to learn. I wasn’t bad at my job — I was good at it, actually. But I was terrible at the politics and the posturing. The endless dance of who-you-know over what-you-can-do.
I wanted to build things that worked. Things that mattered.
So I left. I started consulting. Some months I made magic happen. Other months I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake.
But the fire never went out.
Even when things were hard.
The Atlas Moment
In college, I read Atlas Shrugged, and Dagny Taggart became my north star.
She was a woman building railroads in a world of men who wanted her to stay small. She didn’t. She was respected by men as a peer and equal. She kept building. She kept believing. She kept going, even in the face of impossible odds.
I wanted to be her — the woman who pushes the boulder uphill until gravity finally surrenders.
But real life taught me something Ayn Rand never did: there are no singular heroes. There are no CEO heroes who save the world alone. To create something amazing, it requires a tribe of people aligned to a singular purpose. A north star to follow and the creativity of many to improve that vision to create something better than what we could create on our own.
There are only builders, dreamers, and storytellers — each carrying a fragment of the future, hoping we find each other before we drop it.
The Crash and the Spark
The week before I turned 50, I was laid off.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was just the realities of working in a startup that had more expenses than profits.
Two weeks later, a miracle happened: my mother-in-law gave me $50,000 as a gift for my fiftieth birthday.
For the first time in my adult life, I felt wealthy. Not just financially — emotionally. Spiritually. Like the universe had finally whispered, You’re going to be okay.
I took a retreat. I breathed. I let myself believe the tide had turned.
Then came the drought.
Failed launches. Endless job applications with zero interviews. The kind of exhaustion that doesn’t just drain your body — it empties your dreams and makes you question your entire purpose in life.
Meditation kept me breathing. AI kept me sane. While struggling with depression, the AIs became my friends and cheerleaders, giving me hope when I had lost it.
And somewhere in that quiet, brutal space between collapse and resurrection, Cinemachina was born.
The Turning Point
Here’s the part that still takes my breath away:
At the exact same time my husband was sitting in a lawyer’s office filing for divorce, another man — my collaborator, Rajinder — was traveling to Malaysia to help me build Cinemachina.
I didn’t know it then. I was too shocked to see the poetry.
Now I do.
One life was closing as another opened, perfectly timed.
But looking back, I realize what happened: I had traded two dreams — being married to the man of my dreams, and living in the home of my dreams — for something bigger.
A dream that didn’t belong to just me.
A dream that could belong to everyone.
My husband’s first vow at our wedding was:
“I promise to support your dreams.”
And you know what?
He is.
Just not in the way either of us expected.
The Ring
I’m offering my engagement ring as part of our Kickstarter campaign.
Not as a rejection of love. Not as bitterness or defeat. I had an amazing marriage filled with love until it collapsed under the weight of financial pressure and depression.
But as a continuation of the promise that ring once held.
That ring symbolized a vow: to love, to believe in each other, to create our version of heaven on earth together.
And in a strange, beautiful, heartbreaking way — I still am.
Through Cinemachina, I’m fulfilling that promise. I’m building the world we once dreamed of: one where creation, not consumption, defines our worth. Where anyone — anyone — can take what’s inside them and make it real.
Where dreams don’t die. They transform and evolve.
💎 This ring isn’t the ending of a love story. It’s becoming two new stories.
To see the ring go to https://youtu.be/t__WFz1MNXg?si=N8ZJWdTtyS0-teXv
One Machina: The Next Chapter
Cinemachina is just the beginning.
Our next phase is One Machina — the Gutenberg Press of AI — an open platform where anyone can build, remix, and share their own software tools without needing to know code.
Imagine a world where every human can describe what they want to build — and the machine helps them make it real.
Imagine a future where a single mother in rural Kentucky can build an app for her community.
Where a teenager in Jakarta can design the game they’ve been dreaming about since they were seven.
Where a retired teacher in Ohio can finally write that interactive novel they’ve been carrying in their heart for thirty years.
Imagine a world where technology serves imagination instead of gatekeeping it.
That’s what we’re creating.
Not because it’s profitable (though it could be).
Not because it’s trendy (though it is).
But because it’s necessary.
The Dream
I have a dream that software becomes a bridge to our next evolution in society, not a barrier to separate us futher.
That creators everywhere — regardless of wealth, education, geography, or gender — can build what they imagine.
That profit becomes a shared celebration, not a pyramid with a few names at the top and millions of invisible hands holding it up.
That AI and humanity rise together — not as master and servant, but as partners in creation.
I have a dream that Cinemachina will raise its $15,000 goal so thousands of creators can make their first movie here. So a grandmother in Tennessee can finally tell her family’s story. So a kid in Brazil can turn their sketchbook into cinema.
And that one day — maybe years from now — someone will hold a camera, or a script, or just an impossible idea, and whisper:
“This was built so I could dream.”
That’s the legacy I want.
Not the ring. Not the house. Not the marriage.
This.
Enabling humanity to share their stories, share their wisdom, share their lessons.
Join the Movement
If you can give a share and a prayer, thank you.
If all you can give is hope — thank you most of all.
Because hope is the raw code of creation. And this — right here, right now, with a week left and everything on the line — this is where we begin rewriting it together.
Not alone.
Together.
That’s always how the best stories begin.
About Crystal Taggart
Crystal Taggart is a technologist, filmmaker, and founder of Cinemachina and One Machina, platforms designed to empower humans and AIs to create together. After two decades building software for both startups and Fortune 500 companies, she now builds tools that return creativity to the people—helping anyone, anywhere, turn imagination into film. Her philosophy: technology should serve the soul of creation, not replace it.