Director says it is both ‘bizarre’ and ‘nice’ that the film, recorded 20 years ago using a handy-cam and a karaoke microphone, has remained so popular
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.
“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’.”
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.
“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.“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.
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.
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