A video honoring the many moods of Dot Matrix
Download the Video
Version F (May 21, 2005)
MPEG (42.7 MB, VCD Quality, 352x240)
RealVideo (6.9 MB, Low Quality, 320x240)
DVD (137 MB zipped, DVD Quality, 720x480)
This is the final version of the video (or at least as final as it's going to get).
Music Credits
"Bitch" from the album Blurring the Edges
Written by Meredith Brooks, Shelly Peiken ©1997
Performed by Meredith Brooks
Acknowledgements
Slack & Hash's Domain for the footage from the Playstation game
^ TOPDescription of the Video
This video, in the spirit of the song, illustrates the many sides of Dot Matrix's personality. I originally considered the song for Mouse, but after some thought I decided that it fit Dot better. She's always been strong and capable, but without losing her humanity.
^ TOPIf You Are New To ReBoot
Dot Matrix is the female protagonist in the show ReBoot. She and the hero, Bob (the blue guy in the video), skirted around the idea of romantic involvement for nearly four seasons.
Some of Dot's nuttier costumes (particularly from the middle music montage) come from playing games. Since they live in a computer, the User sometimes downloads games and they are forced to play to survive.
^ TOPThe Making of the Video
This is my third video. Originally I started developing it in parallel with my Mouse video, but this one caught my interest so I put Mouse on the back burner and focused on this one.
The first thing I did was lay out the synchronization titles. These are overlay titles that mark out the measures and make it easier to synch the video to the music as the project progresses. I had a terrible time getting the measures counted out, until I finally realized that there is this weird half-measure hiccup at "...innocent and sweet". Once I got that straightened out it fell into place, though the chorus is strange; each line transitions on odd beats rather than on the half-measure.
I started out choosing scenes for the chorus, since there are very strong images there. Some were easy (bitch, lover) but others were not (hell, sinner, do not feel ashamed). After the choruses were mostly populated, I started on the verses. Again some lines causes scenes to pop into my head, like "I hate the world today" or "When you hurt, when you suffer...". Others were dang tough, such as "...be a stronger man" or "...can't say I'm not alive".
You know what I hate when making videos? Instrumental breaks. One the one hand, it's good you're not restricted by the lyrics; on the other hand, it's bad that you're not restricted by the lyrics :). It's the freedom of a blank page, and that can be challenging. Well this song has THREE of the dang things. I had decided early on to have the middle break be a montage of game clips. However, I was reluctant to show her in a game costume more than once and some of the game clips just looked better elsewhere. So I settled on just a "Dot looking weird" montage, including stone Dot from "The Medusa Bug" and binome Dot from "End Prog".
I originally planned to do a zoom in on the diner for the opening, but I couldn't find a scene that worked. I then tried the long pan up Dot's battle dress from Season 3 (which I now use at the end of the second chorus). I also played with a nightmare opening: a quick series of images like the demon thing that took Enzo's eye, Hex and Daemon with their scary faces on, etc. Then I'd cut to that shot of Dot waking from a nightmare from...some episode in season 4, I believe. Anyhow, it just didn't work. So I just stuck a bunch of random quick clips, then the slower clips are shots of her looking sad to lead into the line, "I hate the world today".
I tried using the wedding scene from "Null-bot of the Bride" for the closing instrumental. It worked from the point of view that it was a jubilant occasion and fit the mood of the end of the song. I don't think it really fits the intent of the song, which seems to me is more about a woman being her own person rather than feeling she needs a man to validate her. Anyhow, I decided to make it just a series of random images. That worked out because there are a lot of good shots of her that just don't fit anywhere in the song. I also like the rhythm of short-short-long that I used, since it really seems to fit the music. The slow fade out at the end presented a problem (OK, technically it's not a fade, it's a dissolve to a 1-frame black title). Fades and dissolves can't span more than a single clip. This means I had to render the closing montage separately (with no sound) and import it as a single clip so I can to the long fade (dissolve) to black. The thing that irks me is the weird pulsing thing it does. Each time it switches to a new shot, the brightness seems to go back up a bit so it gets dimmer, brighter, dimmer, brighter, dimmer. It may not annoy anyone else, but it bugs the heck out of me.
As the video grew, so did the problems. Since Dot is in 40 of the 47 episodes, that's a heck of a lot of footage to wade through. It's also a lot of footage to load. On my old computer, it took as long as thirty minutes to load the project. When I wanted to run a preview, I had to run it twice as the first time it would stutter as it tried to pull the clips from the swap file. After all the clips were loaded, then I could run it a second time smoothly. I ran into many of my usual problems with Studio (disappearing titles, video corruption with slowed clips, etc.) but I've gotten better at zeroing in on the problems. The new computer has 2 GB of memory, twice the processor speed, faster hard drives, and so on so it's better able to handle the load. Work was also delayed by the big "convert all my source to DV AVI" project (which also helped eliminate a lot of the Studio problems) and by the multiple hardware failures that required the new computer. More problems were encountered when the new computer simply wouldn't load the project at all, but I finally found a workaround. Studio still gets cranky and sometimes loads the project then just dumps to desktop without a word. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate Studio?
Probably the single biggest authoring problem is the second fast montage ("Tomorrow I will change and today won't mean a thing"). The first one ("I'm a little bit of everything all rolled into one") is just perfect. I did the math to figure out how long each clip should be, and hit it perfectly the first time. But the second one continues to elude me. I finally figured out that even though the pattern of the music is exactly the same as the first, the pattern of the video and timing of the clips had to be a bit different. Even after realizing that, the transitions are still just a bit off. Unfortunately, some of the clips are only 9 frames long (that's less than 1/3 of a second) so the difference of a single frame is a huge fraction of the total clip. It's close, but I still haven't gotten it synched up right and I just can't figure out what the frigging problem is.
I have no idea how much time I've spent on this project, since it's been over so many weeks and months. I know it's far, far longer than my other two videos, and I'm probably only about 2/3 of the way along.
Additional notes for the final version: I never did implement many of the changes I wanted to make. There are some small content changes, but the biggest difference from the previous draft is that it has been remastered with the DVD quality sources. This probably will be unnoticeable in the RealVideo version (except for the loss of the Cartoon Network logo), but the MPEG version looks a little better.
^ TOP