The "Dancing Baby", also called "Baby Cha-Cha" or "the Oogachacka Baby", is an internet meme of a 3D-rendered animation of a baby performing a cha-cha type dance. It quickly became a media phenomenon in the United States and one of the first viral videos in the mid-late 1990s.
Michael Girard, who has worked on Rugrats and The Simpsons , [1] travelled from Holland, Netherlands, to California, United States, in 1993 with his wife Susan Amkraut. [2] There, the couple started the company Unreal Pictures Inc. [2] and the team began the "Biped" animation project by developing sample 3D animated files. [3] The samples would be released in Character Studio, a plug-in for the Autodesk 3ds Max application (known as "3D Studio Max" at the time) from a division of Autodesk, Kinetix. [2] [4]
Robert Lurye, who was animating at Rhythm and Hues Studios, was hired by the company and was told to make more samples. Lurye started changing the choreography of a dancing adult skeleton that had been made by the team (the "chacha.bip" file). [2] [3] He added more dance moves, such as making it "play air guitar for a second and bend over and shake its shoulders." [2] For the visuals, Unreal Pictures Inc. had multiple renderings of creatures that could be animated, including an alien, a dinosaur and a baby. [3] The baby, made by modeler Tony Morrill, had been bought from a Viewpoint DataLabs listing. [5] [2] Team member John Chadwick, by using the Physique software, made the baby model perform the skeleton's dance. He stated that it was his idea to load the dancing animation on the baby. [1] Vulture, a pop culture website owned by New York magazine, reports that the animation was also developed by Paul Bloemink, John Hutchinson and Adam Felt. [6]
The result was a file with the name "sk_baby.max". [6] Kinetix exhibited a demo of the Dancing Baby in the 1995 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. Character Studio was released in August 1996. According to The New York Times , Girard had discarded the Dancing Baby, opining it was "disturbing" for its realistic nature, in contrast to Disney animations at the time. [2]
LucasArts animator and Autodesk customer Ron Lussier recovered the Dancing Baby by recombining the chacha.bip file with the baby model (which was commercially available), made some minor changes and posted it on a CompuServe Internet forum as an .avi format. [2] [3] [7] He also reportedly sent the Dancing Baby to his colleagues by e-mail. [8] [9] Although Girard credits Lussier as being responsible for the meme's spread, [7] news website Vox reports that the meme became viral after it was converted and posted as an animated GIF by developer John Woodell. [10]
Users and animators were able to render their own video clips of the 'original' animated dancing baby (sk_baby.max) and circulate these via the Compuserve (Internet) forums, World Wide Web (commercial and private websites), and in print ads and unrestricted e-mail. Such activity proliferated most significantly from mainstream (Windows users) royalty-free access to and user renderings of the 3D dancing baby source file for use on the Internet and in broadcast television via several news editorials, advertisements, and even comic programming in local, national (U.S.), and various international markets. Woodell's animated GIF then proliferated to numerous other websites, and later proceeded to show up in a broad array of mainstream media, including television dramas (such as Ally McBeal ), commercial advertisements, and music videos between 1997 and 1998.
Variations to the original animation were later produced by numerous animators by modifying the sk_baby.max sample file's animation or the baby model itself, including a "drunken baby", a "rasta baby", a "samurai baby", and others. However, none of these became as popular on the Internet as the original file, and most popular uses of Dancing Baby are virtually unchanged from the original character mesh and animation.
In February 2020, Twitter user @JArmstrongArty not only rediscovered the original Dancing Baby file, but also converted the original animation into high definition. [11]
Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating moving images. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both still images and moving images, while computer animation only refers to moving images. Modern computer animation usually uses 3D computer graphics.
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Autodesk Maya, commonly shortened to just Maya, is a 3D computer graphics application that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, originally developed by Alias and currently owned and developed by Autodesk. It is used to create assets for interactive 3D applications, animated films, TV series, and visual effects.
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has offices worldwide. Its U.S. offices are located in the states of California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Its Canada offices are located in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta.
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AutoShade was an early 3D rendering package for use with AutoCAD. Autodesk developed Autoshade in 1987. It became obsolete after the release of Autodesk's 3D Studio.
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Messiah is a 3D animation and rendering application developed by pmG Worldwide. It runs on the Win32 and Win64 platforms. It is marketed to run on Mac OS X and Linux via Wine. Messiah's fourth version, messiah:studio was released April 2009 and version 5.5b as messiah:animate was released November 2006. messiahStudio6 was released in April 2013. Messiah seems no longer maintained since 2013 (abandoned).
Cyber Studio CAD-3D is a 3D modeling and animation package developed by Tom Hudson for the Atari ST computer and published by Antic Software. The package is a precursor to 3D Studio Max.
The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
Nyan Cat is a YouTube video uploaded in April 2011, which became an Internet meme. The video merged a Japanese pop song with an animated cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso flying through space and leaving a rainbow trail behind. The video ranked at number five on the list of most viewed YouTube videos in 2011.
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