The transformation of Hexadecimal from villain to hero
Download the Video
Version F (May 15, 2004)
MPEG (40.5 MB, VCD Quality, 352x240)
RealVideo (6.6 MB, Low Quality, 320x240)
DVD (151 MB zipped, DVD Quality, 720x480)
Music Credits
"Bring Me to Life" from the album Fallen
Written by Ben Moody, Amy Lee and David Hodges ©2002
Performed by Evanescence
Acknowledgements
AvA from Dreams in Digital and RFU (both sites are apparently gone now) -- her Daemon video using this song is what inspired me to create this
^ TOPDescription of the Video
The video follows Hex's story throughout seasons 3 and 4, from the accident with the game cube to her sacrifice to save The Net. OK, she was really only trying to save Bob, but The Net was saved as well. The video starts at the moment when Bob cures her. Hex flashes back to the events leading up to this moment, then the video follows the story from there. I tried to hit the highlights of her story, though it was hard to cram that much plot into a four-minute video.
^ TOPIf You Are New To ReBoot
Of the videos I've made so far, this is probably the hardest to follow if you've never seen the show, so I'll try and give a synopsis. Hexadecimal was one of the shows recurring villains, an insane and powerful virus. At one point she was in an accident and badly injured. In her weakened state, she was imprisoned and tortured by another virus named Megabyte. She managed to escape, still hurt and even more insane than before, and went into hiding. The series hero, Bob, finds her and manages to heal her. In the process she becomes (sort of) sane and develops a crush on him. She tries to become good in order to please Bob. However, when an even more powerful virus named Daemon comes to the system, she is forced to revert to her old, crazy self to get her powers back so she can defend the system. In the end, the entire net is going to be destroyed by Daemon and in order to stop her, Hex sacrifices herself to cure Daemon's infection of all the computers in the world.
^ TOPThe Making of the Video
I just love Hexadecimal. She's my second favorite animated psychotic (my favorite being Harley Quinn). Ever since I started the video thing, I've wanted to do a Hex video but I couldn't find a good song. Beautiful doesn't count because she was just a co-star in that, though her scenes are still my favorite part of the video. I've kept an ear out for a good song for her for months now.
You need to realize that I'm an old fogie. As I've gotten older, I've realized that all popular music pretty much sounds alike and have lost touch with anything written in the last ten years or so. So it's nice when I come across a piece of music that sparks something. When I first watched AvA's video, I fell in love with the song and I felt I just had to use it in a video. Listening to the lyrics, I immediately thought of Hexadecimal. She "came to life" at the end of season 3 as she, realizing Bob likes nice girls like Dot, tried to do good. Once I had that idea, the video just popped full blown into my head.
Unfortunately, I was dealing with a crippled computer at that time and spend several days with this video screaming to get out, and no tools to create it. I finally got the computer rebuilt, reformatted, and reinstalled, and got to work. I was able to produce the first draft in about three hours, which is much less than usual. I had already picked out clips for certain landmarks in the song such as "Now that I know what I'm without..." and "Frozen inside..." and it was just a matter of inserting clips chronologically between each landmark to lay out the story. Interestingly, the "eyes like open doors" was completely coincidental. I was just plopping in random clips of Hex's face in the intro, leading up to the first cannon shot, and *bam* here's this clip almost perfectly coinciding with the lyrics. I just love when that happens.
After that, each draft was just a matter of tweaking on the rough sketch I had laid out. For example, I spent a lot of time trying to get rid of the talking scenes. I find talking scenes in videos to be distracting. I still think the park scene is way too talky, but I was never able to find good clips that weren't. (One exception I'll note to my dislike of talking scenes: the clip where Hex says, "Oh, Bob!". That is just perfect for that point in the music.)
As I went along I made a few mistakes. Probably the biggest was when I decided that I really liked the way the triple-shot of the destruction of the Tor coincided with the "can't wake up" lyrics. So I decided to do it every time there was a "wake me up" or "can't wake up". It looked really, really bad. It was just frenetic and annoying. Sometimes less is more.
There are a few things that I'm disappointed in, but they are things I can't fix. I wish Bob, rather than Matrix,
had cured Hex of Daemon's infection as it would have fit the song better. (Hey, Mainframe -- go fix that, OK? I'll
wait...) I wish there were
better transition scenes from Hex's escape to her abduction of Bob, and from the null cocoon to White Hex. I also
wish
there was more of a sense of closure after her battle with Daemon, but since she didn't technically beat Daemon I
just had to skip to the "dancing with Bob" scene. I'm unhappy with the abrupt decrease in picture quality when the
season 4 clips start, but I can fix that in May.
And I don't like the ending. Yeah, I know, how else are you going to end a Hex video, but it just feels kind of
blah to me.
I polished the timing like I always do...then Studio messed the synch up during the render *sigh*. The soundtrack was just a hair off in both the MPEG and the RealVideo, though it's fine in the DV AVI master. I finally got TMPGEnc to put out a good MPEG, but the RealVideo is still off. Normal people probably won't even notice it, but it bugs me. In addition, the RealVideo turned out worse than they usually do. Not only is the picture bad, but the music quality is quite poor as well. As always, I hope that people who like the RealVideo take the time to download the MUCH higher quality MPEG.
This video took me only 20-25 hours to create, which is far less than any other. Part of the reason is simply that I had a clear idea of the entire video before I even started. With my other videos I had to hunt for shots, but with this one I was telling a story so the shots were already laid out in order. This isn't a video about Hex; it's a video about the Hex storyline. Another reason the video went so quickly is that this is the first video made exclusively on my Alienware, and exclusively from DV AVI source video. I had far fewer headaches with Studio than I usually do. I'm hoping this is a sign that future videos will be less of an exercise in frustration.
The original release was verson E on March 2004. The video was remastered using the season 4 DVDs and re-released May 2004. There are slight changes in timing, some deliberate, some due to the stretched nature of the season 4 DVDs. These changes are probably not even noticeable.
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