Twenty years ago, a group of New Zealand martial arts students pooled their dollars, bought a pricey leather jacket and created a 16-minute Matrix-inspired fanfiction short in the backroom of an Auckland punk bar and the city’s low-lit alleyways.
Over nine nights, the amateur film-makers and wannabe stunt actors shot the film, The Fanimatrix: Run Program, on a handy-cam, recording sound on a karaoke microphone attached to a broomstick and lighting their scenes with a couple of lamps borrowed from the local film school.
It was meant to be a test of their skills – both in film-making and martial arts – but, more than anything, it was something fun to do, says its director, Rajneel Singh.
The students had been mucking about for six months filming their stunts when they decided to push the idea further and create a narrative film. But an original idea was proving hard to come by.
“So I said, there are these things called fan films on the internet and why don’t we try something like that?” Singh recalls. “We knew martial arts, and I knew a whole bunch of people in the goth/punk scene at that time. I thought ‘these things go together in only one particular franchise – The Matrix’.”
Singh predicted there would be a lot of hype for a Matrix spin-off – 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 about to become the biggest thing culturally they would ever be,” Singh says. “It was the height of that particular kind of fan activity … and there were dedicated websites and forums for it.”
Twenty years on, the short has become the oldest active torrent in the world. A torrent is a file that contains information such as a film but instead of downloading a file from a centralised server, a user downloads it from others on the network – a faster process because the file is broken into smaller pieces. As of this week, 780 people are long-term sharing the file, or “seeding” it. This means they are keeping the torrent active on their computer by downloading or uploading the file so others can download it, which 3,056 users are now doing.
It is a legendary achievement for those well-acquainted with torrent technology, and one that has cemented the film’s place as a time-capsule of early internet history.
‘Part of the web’s history’
The fast-paced short looks plucked straight from The Matrix universe, as it follows “two of the good guys” entering the simulated reality on a mission. The lead male character causes a commotion at a bar in order to distract the “system” while the other lead character fulfils her task. “It’s sort of a semi anticlimactic story but in the middle of it we have two big martial arts fights, wire work and a big foot chase through the entire city,” Singh says.
The NZ$900 project – $500 of which was spent on the main character’s leather jacket – was then uploaded to the still-young BitTorrent filesharing website, where it suddenly, and unexpectedly took off. Within months, the film had been downloaded millions of times.
The internet of 2003 looked very different to what we have today – YouTube did not exist, and downloading files using dial-up modems could take hours, if not days.
“BitTorrent was the only viable way for film-makers to share their creations without paying massive distribution fees,” says Ernesto van der Sar, the founder of TorrentFreak.com, a news website dedicated to filesharing.
In order to share a file via BitTorrent, at least one person has to share it actively.
“Traditionally, most people stop sharing after a few days or weeks,” van der Sar told the Guardian, adding that very popular releases can stay active for longer but often those became unavailable as people lose interest.
“The fact that an independent film remains available for 20 years is quite a feat,” he said. “Seeing it still being shared shows that people value this part of the web’s history.”
The film-makers thought their project might attract a very niche fan film audience. “We just wanted to make something for our reels … and if it was a total flop we would know that we were wasting our time,” Singh says.
A crew member who also appears in the film juggling glass balls, Sebastian Kai Frost, was responsible for uploading the file to BitTorrent – a technology so new at the time that Singh did not know what it was. “I said, ‘hey, look man, if you’re suddenly excited by hosting this thing and it’s not going to cost us money, by all means, do what you got to do’.”
Frost’s idea paid off – within a few months, their project had become the most widely viewed short film in New Zealand history at that time, Singh says.
“I also found out years later that the Wachowskis had seen it … and that it was one of their favourite fan films,” Singh says, adding that at one stage the sisters had been exploring the possibility of doing a documentary about Matrix franchise fans and had signalled their interest in including his short.
That his film has maintained its appeal and continues to attract downloads is both “bizarre” and “nice”, he said. “I think there’s a little bit of historical novelty there – it’s so cheap, so grimy and people get a bit of enjoyment out of it because those basic elements are done relatively well.”
The Matrix franchise and its fan spin-offs were big among IT, hacker and nerd circles, Singh says, 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 a such a curious little corner of internet history and lore.”
