The Calculator, The Onion, and The End of "Asking for Permission"

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The Calculator, The Onion, and The End of "Asking for Permission"

Particle6 by Eline van der Velden

Hannah Ren

Dec 20, 2025

Evening, CEO!

While I was debating if changing from “day pajamas” into “night pajamas” counts as productivity, Eline van der Velden was busy dismantling the entire business model of Hollywood.

She’s the founder of Particle6.

She managed to cut production costs by 60%, turned an “actress” who doesn’t physically exist into a global news sensation, and is currently running circles around traditional studios who are still trying to figure out how to convert a PDF.

Here is how she stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb (AI), and how we can steal her playbook.

1. Stop Waiting for the Bus (It broke down in 2012)

Here is a visual representation of my early career strategy:

Me, sitting on a bench. Waiting for a fancy person in a suit to walk by, hand me a bag of money, and say, “Hannah, we have been waiting for your genius.”

Spoiler: The bench is cold. The suit never comes. And I just get older and hungrier.

Eline calls this “Waiting for the Bus.”

In the TV world, producers spend their lives writing pitches and praying that a commissioner at the BBC or Netflix picks them. They are gatekeeper-dependent. They are playing the lottery, but the ticket costs six months of unpaid work.

Eline looked at the timetable and realized the bus wasn’t coming.

The budgets are shrinking. The risk appetite is zero.

So, she built a car.

She realized that if she used AI to handle the heavy lifting—pre-visualization, editing, background generation, lighting planning—she didn’t need the gatekeeper’s massive budget.

She could go directly to the client (or the audience) and say, “I can do this for half the price, twice as fast, and it will look like a million bucks.”

The Playbook:

Stop asking for permission to do your job.

If you are waiting for a “boss” or a “client” to give you the resources to do your best work, you are going to die on that bench.

Use the tech to lower your own cost of delivery so drastically that you don’t need their permission to start.

2. It’s Not a Terminator, It’s a Calculator

I often have this sinking feeling that I arrived at the tech party just as everyone else is packing up, and now the robots are here to take the snacks. It’s a heavy feeling.

It’s a valid fear.

But Eline has a different perspective. She compares AI in 2025 to Excel in the 1980s.

When spreadsheets arrived, accountants panicked. They thought, “Well, that’s it. The machine can do the math. I guess I’ll go live in the woods and eat berries.”

But accountants didn’t go extinct. The ones who insisted on using an abacus did. The ones who learned Excel stopped doing basic arithmetic and started doing financial strategy.

Eline treats AI as the “Calculator for Creatives.”

She doesn’t let it replace the human “desire” to tell a story (because AI has the emotional depth of a teaspoon). She uses it to handle the drudgery.

Need a location scout? AI does it.
Need to visualize a shot list? AI generates the storyboards.
Need to fix a lighting error? AI patches it in post.

This moves her up the food chain. She isn’t a “camera operator” or an “editor” anymore. She is the Architect of the Vision.

The Playbook:

If you are still billing for “doing the math” (the manual execution), you are in the danger zone.

Shift your value proposition. Be the person who knows what to put into the spreadsheet, not the person manually adding up the columns.

3. The Onion Theory of Infinite Leverage

This is where my brain actually melted a little bit.

Eline created an AI actress named Tilly Norwood.

Tilly has been interviewed, featured in global news, and offered roles in major movies.

Tilly is data.

Eline didn’t just generate a pretty face on Midjourney and call it a day. She built an asset using what she calls the Onion Theory.

Layer 1 (The Skin): They generated 2,000 images to get the perfect look. Freckles, skin texture, imperfections.
Layer 2 (The Meat): Movement and voice. How she walks, how she laughs.
Layer 3 (The Soul): This is the kicker. They built a backend database of her personality, humor, and backstory.

Tilly isn’t a drawing. She is a Digital Twin.

Here is why this is genius:

A human actor can be on one set, at one time. If they get the flu, production stops. If they have a meltdown in a trailer, you lose money.

Tilly can be in 50 movies simultaneously. She can work 24 hours a day. She never needs a latte. She scales infinitely.

I, personally, cannot scale. I need a nap after a Zoom call.

Eline has moved from selling labor (hours on set) to selling assets (IP that works while she sleeps).

The Playbook:

What is the “Tilly Norwood” of your business?

What can you build once—a framework, a software tool, a content library, a custom GPT—that can “perform” for fifty clients at once while you are eating a sandwich?

To recap:

The bus isn’t coming, so stop waiting on the bench.

The AI isn’t here to kill you; it’s here to do the heavy lifting so you don’t throw out your back.

And if you want true leverage, stop selling your sweat and start building onions.

I’m going to let the AI organize my file structure while I go stare at a tree. It’s called delegation.

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