tA few years ago, a group of New Zealand The martial arts students pooled their dollars, bought an expensive leather jacket and created a 16-minute Matrix-inspired fanfiction short film in the back room of an Auckland punk bar and in the city's dimly lit alleys.
Over nine nights, the amateur filmmakers and aspiring stunt actors filmed the movie, The Fanimatrix: Run Program, with a handy camera, recording sound into a karaoke microphone attached to a broom, and lighting their scenes with a pair of borrowed lamps. from the local film school.
It was supposed to be a test of their skills – both in film and martial arts – but, more than anything, it was something fun to do, says its director, Rajneel Singh.
The students had been filming their stunts for six months when they decided to take the idea further and create a narrative film. But it was proving difficult to come up with an original idea.
"So I said, there are things called fan films on the Internet and why don't we try something like that?" remembers Singh. “We knew martial arts and I knew a lot of people in the goth/punk scene at the time. I thought 'these things go together in one particular franchise: The Matrix.'"
Singh predicted there would be a lot of excitement for a Matrix spinoff: Lana and Lilly Wachowski's sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, was about to be released and fan fiction films as a medium were taking off in online circles.
“Fan films were basically on the verge of becoming the most culturally important thing they would ever be,” Singh says. "It was the height of that particular type of fan activity... and there were websites and forums dedicated to it."
Twenty years later, the short has become the oldest active torrent in the world. A torrent is a file that contains information like a movie, but instead of downloading a file from a centralized server, a user downloads it from others on the network, a faster process because the file is divided into smaller parts. As of this week, 780 people are sharing the file long-term or “seeding” it. This means that they keep the torrent active on their computer by downloading or uploading the file so that others can download it, which 3,056 users now do.
It's a legendary achievement for those familiar with torrent technology, and one that has cemented the film's place as a time capsule of the early history of the Internet.
'Part of the history of the web'
The brief, fast-paced glimpses are lifted straight from the Matrix universe as they follow “two of the good guys” entering the simulated reality on a mission. The male protagonist causes a commotion in a bar to distract the “system” while the other protagonist carries out his task. "It's a semi-disappointing story, but in between we have two big martial arts fights, wire work, and a big foot chase across the city," says Singh.
The NZ$900 project (500 of which was spent on the main character's leather jacket) was uploaded to the still young file-sharing website BitTorrent, where it suddenly and unexpectedly took off. Within months, the film had been downloaded millions of times.
The Internet of 2003 was very different from what we have today: YouTube didn't exist, and downloading files using dial-up modems could take hours, if not days.
"BitTorrent was the only viable way for filmmakers to share their creations without paying huge distribution fees," says Ernesto van der Sar, founder of TorrentFreak.com, a news website dedicated to file sharing.
To share a file via BitTorrent, at least one person must actively share it.
"Traditionally, most people stop sharing after a few days or weeks," van der Sar told The Guardian, adding that very popular releases can stay up for longer, but often become unavailable when people loses interest.
"The fact that an independent film is still available for 20 years is quite a feat," he said. "Seeing it still being shared shows that people value this part of web history."
The filmmakers thought that their project could attract a very specialized audience. "We just wanted to make something for our reels... and if it was a total flop, we'd know we were wasting our time," says Singh.
A crew member who also appears in the film juggling crystal balls, Sebastian Kai Frost, was responsible for uploading the file to BitTorrent, a technology so new at the time that Singh didn't know what it was. "I said, 'Hey, look, if you're suddenly excited about putting this together and it's not going to cost us any money, do what you have to do.'"
Frost's idea bore fruit: within a few months, his project had become the most viewed short film in New Zealand history at the time, says Singh.
"I also found out years later that the Wachowskis had seen it... and that it was one of their fan-favorite movies," Singh says, adding that at one point the sisters had been exploring the possibility of making a fan documentary from the Matrix franchise and had expressed interest in including their short.
That his film has maintained its appeal and continues to attract downloads is both “strange” and “nice,” he said. "I think there's a little bit of historical novelty there: It's very cheap, very dirty, and people enjoy it a little bit because those basic elements are relatively well made."
The Matrix franchise and its fan spin-offs were very popular among IT, hacker and nerd circles, says Singh, and "those people are the same people today who are interested in looking at the history of [films] like this.
"It's interesting... and a very strange thing... to be part of such a curious little corner of Internet history and lore."
