

In late 1996, web developer John Woodell created a highly compressed animated GIF from the source movie, as part of a demo of the movie-to-GIF process, which further enabled the spread of the "Dancing Baby" across the Internet. From that it quickly traveled to the internet and became the strange phenomenon that it was. A week or so later I heard from fellow employees that the animation was traveling through the company via e-mail… then a bit later, I heard people say they had received it back again from people outside the company, across the country. I showed it to a few people and one of them asked me to forward it to them in e-mail. Ron Lussier, who was working for LucasArts at the time, tweaked the original file and shared it with coworkers via email, sparking the baby's internet travels: The source file (sk_baby.max) was released in Autumn 1996 as part of product sample source files included in Character Studio, a 3D character animation software by Kinetix/Autodesk. In late 1996, web developer John Woodell created a highly compressed animated GIF from the source movie, as part of a demo of the movie-to-GIF process, which. The original "cha-cha" dance file was developed by Michael Girard and Robert Lurye.
