The Story Behind the 405 Movie
If you have never seen it, then you need to spend 3 minutes and watch this little movie.
This entire 180-second video is CGI, was produced in 2000, and is the brainchild of Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt and made on a $300 budget ($140 of that budget was used to pay fines for walking on the freeway while filming). (source – Wikipedia)
“405 The Movie” was one of the first viral videos on the internet (we are talking some five years before YouTube) and used both live-action and computer-generated imagery. It took three and a half months to complete and when finished, it forever changed the world of CGI. Bruce and Jeremy wrote, shot, directed, composed, and where the sound effects editors for this masterpiece.
We aren’t talking about some big company with hundreds of employees and thousands of dollars, we are talking about two guys, $300 and self-taught skills, and home personal computers. No SGI’s (Silicon Graphics, the once de facto computer for High-performance computer and visual effects), no Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), just a Canon Optura digital video camera, Pentium II and Pentium III computers with LightWave 3D, Digital Fusion, and Adobe Premiere.
The short consisted of 62 shots, 42 of which were digitally rendered. Nineteen of those shots are entirely digital in origin.
Jeremy and Bruce worked together on the Star Trek: Voyager TV series as Visual FX (VFX) artists in 1998. In 2000 they came up with the idea for 405 and worked on it as a side project for a little over three months.
If you haven’t seen this video before or you just want to watch it again, you can find it below. It is a great video, and knowing the story behind it makes it all that much better.
It gave Bruce and Jeremy their 15-minutes of fame and some, including being Emmy nominated for visual effect artist and once they gained their notoriety, Bruce and Jeremy have worked on TV shows and movies like The X-Files, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Other credits include Spawn, Devil’s Advocate, and the TV movie G-Saviour. They also appeared on The Today Show, Access Hollywood, Roger Ebert, Extra, and many more news shows and publications.
