Character Studio is a plug-in product for 3D Studio Max that assists in creating character animation. It comes with a number of demo files, both figures and motion files. Characters that come with the product include an alien, a chimp, an harlequin, a woman, a "monster" (Olaf), and the baby. The motion files that originally shipped with R1 included a run and jump, a "plie", some ballet steps, a "drunk" walk, and a "cha-cha". Most of these animation files were originally done on the "skeleton" structures that control body movement and later "loaded into" various characters.

So there was this cha-cha file (Animated by Michael Girard and Robert Lurye), and they put it on every darn model they had. But there was some technical problem with the shoulders when it was created (no motion)... Then for Kinetix' 1996 NAB reel, somebody put that animation on the baby model (by Viewpoint Datalabs), and later a few people were talking about how disturbing this dance motion was on the baby... in an interesting way. It seems to really bug some people. But personally I thought it was annoying for reasons. One, it's inherant strangeness, and two, the file was very unfinished - horrible textures, no lighting, that standard computer graphics "floaty" feel to the motion - it needed help.

So when I got the software, I loaded up the baby (with the deformation already set-up by John Chadwick) and I tried to fix it up and make it look more "finished", I added some shoulder bounce, re-timed the hands, re-textured (colored) the surfaces, re-lit it, altered some skinning parameters, rendered it out, and brought it to work (LucasArts at the time) to show off Max's character animation abilities... that was Oct/September of 1996 (file date is 8/28/96). I showed it to a few people and one of them asked me to forward it to them in e-mail. A week or so later I heard from fellow employees that the animation was travelling through the company via e-mail... then a bit later, I heard people say they had recieved it back again from people outside the company. From that it quickly travelled to the internet and became the strange phenomenon that it is now.

A couple of months later I did a second demo file enhancement (BabDanc2.avi) from a file called Ballet.bip, this time doing almost all of the upper body animation myself. This one did not leak to the internet then, but has now... we'll see if it's ever nearly as popular....

I did not do the Drunken Baby animation, it is another enhanced demo file combination. I don't know it's source.

Kinetix has released a number of motion capture animations with the baby.

The appearances on Ally McBeal were obviously inspired by the original "net dance" files but were not done by me. They were done by Encore Video and Liquid Light.

I did not put any music to the animation(s), the music has been added by other people. The Ooga-Choka music that seems to be the most famous soundtrack was originally by B.J. Thomas(?). The actual Ooga-Choka version is a 70's cover of that song by a group called Blue Swede.