This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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 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.
“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.
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.
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.
The original article contains 987 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The original download page links to the torrent file. When seeding it the client reports the magnet link.
Also probably one of the oldest active torrent trackers in the world.
