A little background

In order to fully appreciate the upcoming Meatrix sequel, I think it’s only appropriate that I give you a little background and get you up to speed with the first film (which you can still watch at www.themeatrix.com).

The Meatrix was first released in Nov 2003. We won it as an award from Free Range Graphics. Over 50 organizations had submitted proposals for their first ever Flash activism grant – 4 groups submitted proposals on factory farming, and we were chosen the winner because we not only pitched doing a flash on factory farming, we also gave concrete solutions on what people could do, specifically to use the Eat Well Guide.

If you’re new to The Meatrix and our sites, the Eat Well Guide is an online directory of sustaianbly raised meat, poultry, dairy and eggs from farms, stores, restaurantsand online outlets in the US and Canada. We think it’s one thing to tell people that there’s a problem with factory farming, but it’s a whole different ballgame when you also include viable options for consumers.

To tell you a secret, the only reason I got behind even submitting a proposal to Free Range was so that we could use the film as a way to market and promote the Eat Well Guide. Little did I know that it would soon take on a life of its own…

After the film was in production and we decided on an early November release (to coincide with Thanksgiving), we found out that the third Matrix film was going to be released at the same time. Talk about a good omen! We ended up releasing I think 2 days before the third Matrix film released.

We were told by Free Range that if 10,000 people viewed the film it would be considered a success. So we released on the 3rd (which you might think is a really big deal but you literally push one button and then go back to your other work….) I had factored in maybe 3 months of my time for the movie – I figured after then it would have seen its heyday.

The first day all the emails we got in were from colleagues we’d sent the film directly to. On the second day, we got a couple requests – even got one from Poland. On the first day, 3,800 people watched the film. On day two, 28,129 people watched (with over 507,000 hits) – day two alone was more than we thought would ever watch TM. We had over 1000 people watch in a half hour on that second day.

By day 3, we’d received emails from people in Australia, Italy, Poland, The Netherlands, Canada, Republic of Georgia,and Israel. We’d gone over double our bandwidth allotment at the web hosting company. At the beginning of day 3 (11:30 am to be exact), we had 55,394 unique visitors and over a MILLION total hits (1,018,291). At the end of the day at 5:30pm, 80,313 people had come to the site to watch the film.

By the 5th day after release, educators had started using the film to teach their classes. People from Brazil and other countries were writing asking for versions in their language and the press started to pick up on the buzz. And by day 5 we had to switch servers because they couldn’t handle the load. The site crashed twice due to traffic and by the end of day 5 we had 161,319 unique visitors.

By day 7 we were almost at a million people – yes, a MILLION people. By week two, we were getting so many emails that I was staying at work until 9pm or so just trying to fulfill all the requests. A lot of schools, students, educators and people speaking at events asked for copies. This quickly lead us to making offline copies of the movie – in vhs, dvd, beta, etc., versions.

And talk about linking! In December 2003 alone, we had over 27,000 (yes that’s 27,000) web sites linked to us!

Tomorrow, I’ll fill you in on more that happened – but if you’re wondering where we’re at now – last month, two years after release, we had over 165,000 new people come and watch the film.

Hopefully, when the new film launches it’ll take us into a whole new level – more on those plans over the next few weeks….