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July 24, 1997
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
Oh, Baby! The Story of a Toddler Who Traveled the Web
ichael Girard has given a new twist to the infant art of computer animation, and its name is "Baby Cha."
Conceived as a software demonstration, Girard's creation is more generally known as the Dancing Baby, an oddly shaped toddler that twirls in perpetuity on dozens of Web sites around the world.
Reactions to Baby Cha -- short for cha-cha, the diapered dumpling's dance step of choice -- range from delight at its animated antics to dismay over its expressionless features and out-of-proportion body parts.
Yet the sustained popularity of the swivel-hipped video clip reflects the art world's recent fascination with digital manipulations of the human form while hinting at the implications of developments to come in 3-D computer animation.
The Dancing Baby was born after Girard and his wife, Susan Amkraut, returned in 1993 from teaching in Holland to start a software company in Palo Alto, Calif., with a third partner, John Chadwick.
Almost immediately, their firm, Unreal Pictures Inc., developed a prototype program for setting two-legged 3-D creatures in motion by outlining, Arthur Murray-style, a pattern of footprints. To help market their "Biped" system, Girard designed a demo of an adult skeleton tripping the light fantastic.
"The cha-cha motion and the basic arm motion -- the way the hand flips over the head -- go way back to very first prototype," Girard said. "It was always one of the better examples of what you could do in terms of the rhythm of the steps."
The program was eventually released in August 1996 as Character Studio, a plug-in for the popular 3D Studio Max animation application from Kinetix Corp.
Before the launch, Robert Lurye, an animator at Rhythm & Hues Studios in Los Angeles, was hired to produce more samples. He began by modifying the basic choreography. "He really gave it more attitude, more expression," Girard said.
Taking a normally proportioned skeleton, Lurye said he "made it up as I went along. I had the thing play air guitar for a second and bend over and shake its shoulders."
Because one of Character Studio's primary features is that it adjusts for different skeletal structures, the Unreal Pictures team also supplied Lurye with digital renderings of a dinosaur and Demi Moore, among others.
Credit: Kinetix Variations on a Baby:
other members of the troupe.
"The first time we saw it, it was on a purple alien," Lurye said. "The second time, they mapped it onto a baby. So it was all kind of a mad-scientist project."
A demo of Baby Cha was shown by Kinetix at the Siggraph conference two years ago.
"At the time, I remember how disturbing it was and not really understanding why until I realized that the structure of a baby has a lot of baggage that comes with it about how we expect babies to move," Girard said.
"If you look at Disney animations, the babies sometimes do very grown-up things. When it's not photo-realistic, it's easy to brush it off as being an expression of an adult's imagination. But when you see it in a three-dimensional form, it takes on more of an external reality."
So Girard decided to discard the demo.
But the child was reborn when Ron Lussier, who works at LucasArts in San Rafael, Calif., applied the same commercially available 3-D model of a baby to the Unreal team's choreography. Lussier added a few tweaks -- including a pair of shortened legs and a minuscule wiggle -- and posted the results as an .avi-format video file on a CompuServe forum.
"The original name of the motion file was chacha.avi, and chacha.bip was the name of the Biped file that was adapted to the baby," Girard explained. "That's why Ron, who posted the final, finished work, called it Baby Cha."
Baby Cha capered through cyberspace as quickly as muddy footprints spread through a kindergarten classroom.
For example, Bryan Nelson, who maintains a Web site called TheEpicenter.com, added a link to the Dancing Baby from his fun page.
"I also work full time for a large airplane maker in Seattle, and when Dancing Baby first hit the Net, it was being sent all over the company as e-mail attachments," Nelson said. "The Intranet was so bogged down, a voice-mail message was sent out company-wide requesting that people not forward the file -- although the message admitted the movie was very entertaining."
The original version of the Dancing Baby was done without sound, but a number of the sites where it has been reproduced have added audio accompaniment. One page, Da Crib Juke Box, even allows visitors to select from among seven selections, including Peter Gabriel's "Digging in the Dirt."
Girard, 43, said he was unaware of the widespread adoption of Baby Cha, although he acknowledged that the Internet posting has brought both licensing opportunities and job offers, which he has declined. He also has been told that some computers ship with the baby on board.
Although Girard and Amkraut have a 3-year-old, Baby Cha is not based on their son -- or any real-life antecedent. Instead, the 3-D digital rendering of a child is sold by Viewpoint DataLabs as what Girard called "pre-built geometry."
Identified simply as "Infant" in the Viewpoint catalog, the reconstructed kid was originally fashioned after a large plastic doll, according to Tony Morrill, a digital modeler at the Orem, Utah, firm. Morrill later added its diaper for the Kinetix demo.
But Baby Cha's appearance does resemble the photographic portraits of Nancy Burson, who digitally manipulates her images so that they are simultaneously realistic and otherworldly.
Once again, The GIG is up.
Update to July 25, 1996, "arts@large" column.
VODKA TONIC
Absolut Panushka is an online animation festival of 24 short films, most of them prominently featuring the site sponsor's bottle. If you are willing to endure the heavily commercial context and the lengthy download times (about 5 minutes for a 10-second payoff), your visual horizons will be expanded. Among the pleasures are a colorful spiral by Nobuhiro Aihara and some playful spirits drawn by Christine Panushka, the site's curator and a faculty member at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. The site also contains a history of experimental animation that could use clips instead of stills and a make-your-own art cartoon that demonstrates too well the laborious nature of the process.
Charles Stainback, director of exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, is preparing a show that will focus on this theme. When "The Pixelated Body" opens in the coming year, it will present works by artists who use technology to alter the human form, most frequently the face.
"It's really intriguing to me," Stainback asserted. "It talks about our faith in photography, and how we all make pictures of loved ones and look back at them and say, 'Oh, that was grandpa at Lake George in 1947.' Looking at a photograph, we want to believe. We've been trained to believe this thing is real."
"We know computers can alter photographs, but now artists like Keith Cottingham are creating people who didn't exist [through composite imaging]. His portraits look quite normal, but when you finally realize that they don't exist at all, it's kind of creepy," he said.
Baby Cha often elicits the same disconcerted response from viewers, in part because its features remain immobile throughout the duration of the dance. This was not intentional, Girard explained. Character Studio does not animate faces, and programming to add a wink or a smile was never done.
Nor was there time to make the fingers wiggle expressively. "It still bothers me," Lurye said. "I always wanted to go in there and make the hands have more life. It's actually an incomplete piece, and it will always be."
Baby Cha may be mute, but it does suggest a significant new direction for computer animation.
Once a ballet by, say, the dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris is motion-mapped on a computer, the participants could be replaced by digital renderings of Fred Astaire and Barney the dinosaur.
"To some extent, that's what our software is all about: to transform any biped into any other biped," Girard said. "That's where the interesting psychological aspects come out because you're separating the motion from the structure. The baby is a good example of what can happen."
"The fact that any motion of any biped can be mapped onto any other means that really unplanned collaborations can occur. When you have the ability to edit motion-capture data, the world will become flooded with sampled kinds of motions," he said.
"Computer animation will take on a character that's a little more like computer music, where you have sampled sounds and synthesized sounds being combined," Girard said.
Expect it to happen before Baby Cha reaches adolescence.
Related Sites
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to return to this page by clicking on your Web browser's "Back" button or icon until this page reappears.
- Samples of animations generated by the Character Studio software, including some done by Michael Girard, can be found on the Kinetix Corp. Web site
- TheEpicenter.com
- Da Crib Juke Box
- Viewpoint DataLabs
- Nancy Burson
- International Center of Photography
- Keith Cottingham
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