WITB is a very short (under 10 minutes.) video that uses sounds and subject matter from Half Life, LOST, and Jurassic Park. It's shot totally in a first-person point of view, and gives the feeling of watching someone play a videogame. It looks stunning, like a professional studio did it.
With in a month of being posted to his youtube, the video had over one million hits, and speculation on everything from it being a Half Life 3 trailer, to a new Portal trailer, to a Half Life movie, to totally unrelated things were all over the web.
In reality, it was a test video a college student who uses the pseudonym of "TimSmiT" made using his own personal computer at home.
In an interview on a popular Dutch TV show, TimSmiT spoke about future plans, and about his video, saying that when he produced it, he was using a personal computer, and every effect he added took days (think it was around 32 hours each effect.) to render. If he had to re-tweek it, it took another few days to render and let him continue work. The video was done for under 300eu, and was the first of many WITB things to appear.
A website, Whatsinthebox.nl appeared, containing puzzles, a link to the video we had already seen, as well as other 'clues', leading to new videos.
Clues lead to Babel-Research.eu - a site for the fake Babel Research company, the company the 'character' in WITB works for, and where the video starts. The site is set up like a legit science and research site. There are tons of hidden clues all over the site, though, providing an ARG (Alternate Reality Gaming.) aspect to it.
After about a year, everything slowed down, and TimSmiT hadn't been active much. On Jan, 15th 2010, a subscribers to TimSmiT's youtube channel were greeted with a new video. A rather artistic video for the song 'Hey Girl' from Daybroke - a 'rock' band from the Netherlands. The video seems to have all been done in Adobe After Effects, and uses a greyscale environment. When girl in the video finds what can only be the WITB box, and activates it, flourishes of color light up the world.
The girl seems to be enthralled with this, and becomes 'addicted' to the box and it's colors.
During these flourishes, people may miss something. A hint alluded to by TimSmiT on the 'more info' section, about time providing a hint to learn more about the WITB movie.
At 1:43 (see above.) and 1:44,(click link.), another clue clue can be seen. This is the only time in the video you see the WITB icon (The diamond shape with the ? in it.) with a time under i. All other locations in the video simply have ?? confused ? under them.
At 1:29(click link.), a box with 1/3 can be seen in it, on the wall. This is from where the girl is looking out the bus window as it goes down the street.
At 2:22(click link), as the girl runs off from her friends (who seem worried about her 'addiction' to the Box.), when she exits the elevator , this is seen on a wall for a brief moment before vanishing in another flourish.
At 3:15(click link), this is seen in a quick flash, for about 1/25th second, and at a low transparency - this shot has been darkened up a bit so you can see it better.
These seem to be nothing at first, until a flash shows while the girl is having a mental break down (Which starts with the iconic 'halo' of debris forming around her, as it did around the tower in WITB and in the second untitled video). At 3:27(click link), a web address and equation show up, followed by "HTML".
For those who can't see it well :
www.babel-research.eu/ {1/3} / {2/3} / {3/3} HTML
Now, at first, we(the group at unFiction) thought it may be a math equation using the times, converted to decimal numbers (1.29, 2.22, 3.15) but, a member who had thrown together a quick script to test all possible connections found that it was a lot easier than that.
www.babel-research.eu/129/222/315.html
That shows another clip of the Whats in the Box movie, followed up with "MMX" at the end, with the ring in the Box glowing red, giving off a red light-fume effect.
MMX is the roman numeral for 2010.
I spoke to TimSmiT on youtube, asking about this. He responded telling me that he couldn't say much about it, but that we should expect more in 2010. Now, whether this means we should expect the movie or series, or if we're just going to get more clips, iunno.
ANY WAY, back to the song!
I don't have lyrics to it, couldn't find any sites that had 'em. And, it is a relatively new song, from a relatively unknown band, so I figured I wouldn't be able to find them, but, it's not hard to make out what he's saying. Here's the song and video though!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbn5p56vvps
The comments are full of speculation from me and other WITB fans, check them out if you want.
