Welcome to the third installment of our epic interview with Rajneel Singh, director of the classic Matrix fan film, .

If you’ve already seen his 16-minute flick, you know it’s a pulse-pounding action flick made on a non-existent budget; if you haven’t seen it and you happen to dig Keanu Reeves’ second-best franchise, then you owe it to yourself to check this fan film out. After you do, come back and find out how they did it with this installment of our multi-part chat with Singh.

So after nine tough nights, you finally finished shooting. Once you sat down to see what you had, how was the editing process?

The edit was done on Adobe Premiere Pro (7.0) and executed in 4-5 hour blocks over the course of four weeks. At the time, Premiere was notoriously buggy and constantly crashing, so rendering took ages on my tiny home PC, so it was a slow process.

As a director, I tend to shoot-to-edit and not bother getting extra coverage of shots that I don’t need, so the editing process was very straight-forward and the movie pretty much looked exactly as I envisioned in my head.

Did the story change much once you started cutting it together?

The only major change we made in editing was intercutting the Dante Goth Bar Fight with the Medusa Vs. Security Guards Fight. And as an indicator of how well we had shot-listed the film, there were only two shots—both of Medusa moving through the office building—that we dumped. Everything else we shot ended up in the final movie.

What did you use to make your special effects and how long did that take?

There are very few visual FX shots in the film. The majority of them involve adding muzzle-flashes to the gunfire, which was carried out using ALAMDV (the old version of the FXHome software range); it only took a couple of hours to do all of them.

There was some shot editing to remove wires and also to remake the title sequence—both carried out by our photoshop guy David Fraser. I believe it took him a couple of days to execute both shots. The only other visual effect was the Agent dodging bullets, which was carried out using a simple “ghosting” plugin in Premiere Pro. Once it was completed, the film was color-graded inside Adobe Premiere Pro.

You mentioned removing wires—so you guys built a wire harness rig to ‘help’ your actors do some of those jumps?

The wire-harnesses were supplied by Tim McLachlan, our stunt supervisor. My understanding is that the harnesses were home-built, but they were tested and used on many feature films as well.

OK, so after four weeks, you had your movie. Was it a case of ‘wow, now what do we do with this?’ Or did you have a plan all along?

As luck would have it, we screened the film for cast, crew and friends, as the final ever session at a small cinema in downtown Auckland that—for years—had specialized in screening Chinese language films and martial arts films. Prior to the big kung fu movie renaissance we are experiencing now, this cinema was the place where everyone would go to get their badly subtitled, kung-fu-flick fix—and it was scheduled to be torn down the very next day!

We had more than 300 people in the crowd and the reaction was phenomenal—people were cheering, applauding, whooping and we all recieved a standing ovation at the end. It was pretty exciting to know that something we created as an experiment could ellicit such a huge reaction. Of course we had no idea how big that reaction was going to be until a week or so after, when we launched it online.

[Editor’s Note: Released on the web September 27, 2003, The Fanimatrix exploded on contact; written up on Slashdot the day it came out, their website got nearly 3 million hits during the first five days the flick was available. Some say that as a result, it instantly became the most-seen short film from New Zealand ever.]

In the end, how much time do you think you spent on it?

It’s very difficult to calculate, but I would offhand say it was 9 x 12 hour days of shooting and about 20 x 4 hour days of editing, so its 188 hours—just shy of 8 solid days.

That’s a big time commitment—what was going on in your life and your career at that time? How did your working on the film affect the people in your life?

At the time, I was actually in-between jobs and living at home with my parents. I had dropped out of University as the film courses they were teaching turned out to be ineffectual and not focused on practical filmmaking, so I was roaming from one IT-based job to another. Around the time the film came out, I was editing actor’s showreels and doing small IT jobs on the side.

Fortunately for me, I had no significant other at the time and my mom and dad were very patient with my ’sideline’ activity. It didn’t impede too much in their life as I did not involve them in the production, plus it was only nine nights of shooting and the editing was worked around my regular day schedule.

And that all paid off for him as we’ll discover in the next interview installment, so make sure to check in next Friday!