Internet film puts alumnus in driver's seat

Profile: Former CSULB film student Jeremy Hunt makes waves in movie industry with ë405: The Movie'

By Chan Tran
Daily Forty-Niner

"Titanic" may have done it with a gigantic sinking boat and "Jurassic Park" did it with a bloodthirsty T-Rex, but for Cal State Long Beach alumnus and filmmaker Jeremy Hunt, it was the 405 freeway.

Hunt's three-minute short film "405: The Movie," has brought to life the ultimate scare of being a motorist caught in traffic. His ammunition: a DC-10 jumbo jet, the 405 Freeway and himself.

"The action starts quickly," Hunt said of the movie. "It gets out before you get bored."

Hunt plays a driver on a digital reproduction of the 405 Freeway in the movie. Things seem normal until a large jumbo jet decides to make a landing on the highway. The plane makes its descent directly behind Hunt's sport utility vehicle and gobbles his car before coming to a complete stop, leaving Hunt with out a scratch.

In its four-month history, the movie available solely on the Internet has achieved a record two million downloads garnering the biggest industry buzz since the "Blair Witch Project."
Although the onscreen effects are spectacular, the film did not cost millions of dollars to create. It did not take years to complete and it was not created by a Jurassic Park-size crew.

In fact, the movie is the work of only two people, Hunt and his partner Bruce Brant, who used only their personal home computers to create the film. The process took three months of nights, weekends and spare moments.

"It's about talent," Hunt said. "Doing it ourselves had an actual cost of $1,000."

Hunt, a Southern California native, has been working with visual effects for about three years. He transferred to CSULB in 1994 from Cypress Community College straight into film production. He graduated with a degree in film and electronic art in film production in 1998.

He chose the CSULB film department because of its reputation as one the few colleges that treat student filmmakers fairly.

"CSULB helps fund projects, which is pretty rare," Hunt said. "Schools like USC do the same but they end up owning the film. CSULB keeps a print but does not retain ownership."

Hunt decided on a job in visual effects after attending a lecture on visual effects by the owner of Digital Muse, an effects house in Los Angeles that does visual effects for shows like "Star Trek: Voyager" and "X-Files."

"It was  the technical and creative aspects at Digital Muse that were appealing," Hunt said. "It was a perfect fit."

At Digital Muse, Hunt primarily worked on the "Voyager" and "Deep Space Nine" television series. He was also supervising animator on "X-Files" and sequenced the space battle scenes for the Backstreet Boys' "Larger than Life" music video.

He said he wanted to do a short feature during this period, but did not have the right idea until the day Brant, who Hunt met at Digital Muse, did a test for a freeway environment.

"He basically drove home and stuck his digital camera out the window and created this virtual freeway," Hunt said. "An hour later, we came up with the short, simple storyline that became ë405.'"

Two days of live action, the easy part according to Hunt, and three-and-a-half months of manipulation at their personal computers and the film was finished.

"We want to do things that people see and trick people," he said. "While we can make it look real, it's not real."

The decision to go online with the movie was there from the beginning of the project.

"We always had the Web in mind for ë405.' We had to live by rules - manageable file size small enough for people to watch it," Hunt said. "It forced us to make the story as tight as possible."

The awards and publicity keep steamrolling in for the movie including high-profile articles in Rolling Stone, Variety, The Los Angeles Times and television appearances on "Access Hollywood," "CNN" and "Roger Ebert and The Movies" where Ebert said "check out ë405' ... take my word for it."

Earlier this month, the film set a new benchmark for online movies by surpassing two million views in its fourth month online at Ifilm, an Internet portal that provides access to online movies. The "405" VHS tape has gone on sale via its Web site and the movie was also featured at digital day at the Long Beach International Film Festival, where Hunt was a guest speaker.

"We didn't set out to make any statement or break records," Hunt said. "Our intent was never to make money, but to get it out to the most people, as long as it makes the most sense to us.

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