A tribute to the villains of ReBoot
Download the Video
Version H (May 20, 2004)
MPEG (41.0 MB, VCD Quality, 352x240)
RealVideo (6.6 MB, Low Quality, 320x240)
DVD (144 MB zipped, DVD Quality, 720x480)
Music Credits
"Beautiful" from the album Stripped
Written by Linda Perry ©2003
Performed by Christina Aguilera
Description of the Video
This is a tribute to the viruses of ReBoot: Megabyte, Hexadecimal, and Gigabyte (Daemon already has her own video). The song is divided into three sections: "I am beautiful", "You are beautiful", and "We are beautiful". "I am beautiful" is all about the megamloaniacal Megabyte. "You are beautiful" is Hexadecimal's section (who else fits lyrics like "To all your friends you're delirious. You're so consumed in all your doom.") Finally, "We are beautiful" is Gigabyte, the merging of Megabyte and Hexadecimal. The quotation from Christina Aguilera at the end illustrates that this song is an appropriate anthem for these villains.
^ TOPIf You Are New To ReBoot
These are the bad guys. Megabyte is the main villain, the power-mad arch-nemesis of the hero. Hexadecimal is the insane goddess of chaos. Gigabyte was the result of the merging of Megabyte and Hexadecimal into a nearly unstoppable supervirus.
^ TOPThe Making of the Video
I don't like Megabyte. The fans may throw rocks at me for saying that, but Megabyte is boring! He's clichéed and one-dimensional and, although they sinistered him up in seasons 3 and 4, I've never found him interesting. Anyhow, one idea I've been kicking around is a video that makes fun of Megabyte. When I first heard this song, I got a vision of Megabyte strutting to the lyrics "I am beautiful" and I thought this would be the song. Then, the second part of the song starts in on "You are beautiful" and I dropped that idea. But I still really liked the song and I wanted to use it, so I went out on the web, found the lyrics. I saw that line about "delerious" and "consumed in all your doom" and immediately thought of Hex. Well, if Megabyte is "I", and Hex is "you", then "we" would be Gigabyte.
This was my second video, my first being Ave Daemon. Unlike that one, I needed to synchronize this one more precisely. I started on the Gigabyte portion. He's in only one episode so that's the least amount of video to sift through. My first goal was a dramatic visual moment for the first "We are beautiful" line since there is such a strong musical buildup. Well, Giga's first appearance is perfect. I timed it out so that he started standing just at the instant the words "We are beautiful" are sung. It's still my favorite moment in the video. Since Gigabyte has such little video to choose from I didn't try and match his clips to the lyrics. I wanted the most destructive footage I could get to contrast the beauty of the music. So I snagged what clips I could find and strung them together in roughly chronological order. It was enough to give me a rough draft.
Since Giga's appearance was in place, I needed to precede it with the merging. So I mixed clips from Megabyte's first attempt to merge with Hex with his successful merge later to make one scene. However, the explosion scene was just way too long. I needed to link the explosion with the thing crouching in the crater to make it clear this thing was the result of the union. Since both scenes used a rotating zooming pan, I just stuck in a long dissolve. I think it turned out pretty well, and clearly links cause and effect.
With Giga done, I turned to Hex. She's in only a few episodes so it was easy to track down shots of her. I didn't want to use any footage of cured Hex or sprite Hex, since that went against the idea of the video. Initially, I used only season 1 and 2 shots (I hadn't gotten the season 3 DVDs in the mail yet). Later I remembered that Hex went viral again in "Sacrifice", so I pulled out some good footage from there. I particularly wanted shots of that "hand in front of face" expression change thing (I was disappointed when Bob cured that in season 3). I tweaked on the footage speed to synch the expression changes to the beat. That shot with all her masks that I use as her opening sets things up nicely for non-ReBoot fans. The clip for "The piece is gone..." is a little obvious, and a little "inside", but did the job. The shot of Web Hex made for a good closing shot.
That just left Megabyte. Since he's in almost every episode of seasons 1-2, as well as several in 3-4, it took a lot of time. Initially I kept to my original idea of making him look silly, so used shots from "Talent Night" and the shot of him after Hex painted him in "Painted Windows", but I later realized it just didn't mesh with the rest of the video. I still want to do a video that makes him look silly, but this isn't it. So I cut those out and piled on clips of the more sinister Megabyte from Season 4. I still had trouble finding good clips, but I kept searching through the episodes until I found good shots.
This left me with the long intro and the long finish of the song. Originally, I used the shot of Gigabyte flying towards the Principle Office as a sort of "riding off into the sunset" finale, though I wasn't really happy with it. For the opening I decided to use flyover shots of Mainframe culminating at the Principle Office, since that's where the first scene takes place. This was enough to give me a rough video, though it still needed work.
While trying to find credits for the song I found www.christina-aguilera.net, which is where I found that quote I use at the end. I read it and laughed, because it was the perfect description of villains: not accepted, discriminated against, feel good about themselves. I figured I had to use it. I initially put it at the opening, but it set the wrong mood for the video. I moved it the the closing, dumping the "sunset" shot and just put a Gigabyte face shot in the background.
I hit the "sick of looking at it" threshold around July 1 and put it aside for a while. I tweaked on it some more to generate the preview I used to have posted here, putting in more season 3 clips now that I had finally converted the DVDs over. Production also got delayed by the great MPEG to DV AVI conversion event, my massive hard drive failure, my new computer (and Studio's dislike of the new computer). I've revised the Megabyte section more than the other two combined, and I'm still underwhelmed by it but it's as good as it's going to get. I also played a lot with the scene behind the closing quote before settling on the current one (which I love).
Total creation time: about 80-100 hours
Version G was released October 11, 2003 and version H released May 20, 2004. Version H was re-mastered with the season 1, 2, and 4 DVDs. There were also some small editing changes regarding timing and such. The biggest change was the replacement of the "burned Hex" scene. The reason I did this was a) I used that clip in Hexadecimal Brought to Life, b) I don't like using the same clip in multiple videos, and c) that clip is much more appropriate to the other video.
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