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OVER ONE MILLION VISITORS TURN "THE MEATRIX" INTO THE MOST SUCCESSFUL ONLINE ADVOCACY FILM EVER


Record-breaking Flash movie against factory farming spreads like wildfire
through email, blogs, message boards, and scores of websites

Though the much-hyped The Matrix: Revolutions had a mediocre opening weekend, the most recent Matrix spoof -- The Meatrix at www.themeatrix.com -- has become an explosive online hit. Barely a week after its launch, The Meatrix has been seen by more than 1,000,000 individual web users, an unprecedented success for an online advocacy film.

The Flash film has been picked up by outlets ranging from USA Today and NPR to
MichaelMoore.com and AlterNet.org. It reached the top of Blogdex.net’s "most
contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community" and has been
featured on hundreds of blogs, message boards and listserves. Additionally, an
impressive coalition of environmental groups has coalesced behind the film,
including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Public Citizen, Slow
Food USA, the Humane Society of Canada, Friends of the Earth, and the Earth Day
Coalition’s Grist Magazine.

Created by Free Range Graphics (www.freerangegraphics.com) for GRACE, the Global
Resource Action Center for the Environment (www.gracelinks.org), The Meatrix is a
humorous 3-minute Flash animation that highlights the problems of factory farming
while spoofing The Matrix. Instead of Keanu Reaves, The Meatrix stars a young pig,
Leo, who lives on a pleasant family farm ... he thinks. Leo is approached by a
trenchcoat-clad cow, Moopheus, who shows him the ugly truth about agribusiness,
complete with a send-up of the "stop-motion" camerawork immortalized by the Matrix.
The mix of humor, pop culture references, and an important message clearly resonates
with a wide swath of the web using public.

"This film has truly gone viral," says Diane Hatz of GRACE, "People worldwide have
gotten it three, four times in their inboxes. It’s becoming a modern-day cult
classic and it has enormously boosted our campaign to promote sustainable farming."

"To our knowledge, an online advocacy film has never been half as successful as The
Meatrix," says Jonah Sachs, founder of Free Range Graphics, which produces online
campaigns for nonprofits. "The most successful films are lucky to reach 100,000.
Outdoing that by a factor of ten shows that The Meatrix really hit a nerve."

The Meatrix has been hitting email inboxes nationally and internationally as part of
a campaign by GRACE to educate the public on the environmental and health risks of
factory farming, while promoting support of sustainable food production. At the end
of the movie, viewers are encouraged to take action by eating sustainable meat and
supporting local family farmers. Various links are offered, including the Eat Well
Guide -- www.eatwellguide.org -- a free, national online guide to
sustainably-raised meat.
 
 


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