The Story Behind the Skating Babies

How an Evian Ad on YouTube Went Viral, And the CGI Whizzes Who Made It

(CBS)  According to a Pew survey, more than one out of five adult Americans still don't use the internet. What are they missing? Well, as CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports, they're missing the skating babies.

It's a simple formula. Take babies. Put 'em on skates. Add music. Watch the internet hits take off.

The latest viral ad sensation has become the talk of the water cooler crowd, which is just as well as it's for a French bottled water company.

Over six million hits since its release last weekend - almost three million in the U.S. alone. It's rolling toward rarified territory, the 20 million-plus hits that only the lucky few viral ads get to.

But in the viral ad business, you've got to be good to be lucky.

The babies could barely walk, let alone skate. They were placed in front of green screens and Ludo Fealy of the Motion Picture Company and his team in London did the rest, turning the baby-auditioners into roller-dancers.

"They would have rocked the baby gently backwards and forwards with that particular break dance move in mind," Fealy said.

Fealy and his team filmed a professional skater doing the moves, then programmed a computer-generated baby's body to replicate them. Then they added the heads of their baby models, attaching them to the dancing digital bodies. They put it all together over a park scene shot in Melbourne and made to look like Manhattan.

Yet even with this kind of technology, it doesn't always work.

"Its really only one in 50, one in 100 that has this kind of success as this ad's had," said Colin Marrs of Campaign Magazine.

"You can't get too attached to them," Fealy said of his dancing babies.

But the rest of the world already has.

[phydeux2]

Morally questionable? Really? In all my upbringing I've never heard anything to make me think that using a computer to make babies dance would be "immoral". Now, if you'd put marionette strings on those babies, then I might agree with you.

And to "Hamiltongrad": thrashed around? Did you not READ THE ARTICLE? All the "thrashing about" you describe was done by professional adult dancers and a computer just overlaid the babies' images over it. Hollywood does this all the time for major motion pictures, what's the harm here?

I'll bet the REAL babies were not only well taken care of and handled gently, but also loved being the center of everyone's attention as they were being scanned into the computer. What baby wouldn't like half a dozen technicians and camera operators fawning over them?

[hamiltongrad]

I agree. From what I saw, these babies were thrashed around, like rag dolls, just to make a few stinking bucks for some company. Shame.

[cs4466]

Absolutely foul. A cheap, blatant and vulgar marketing attempt using children - unamusing, technologically undistinguished and morally questionable - as much of marketing is today.

[nolies74621]

Lighten up

[docpeter1953]

You really need to get a little bit of a life cs.

[debinok1]

I loved it, so cute. Wish I could still find Evian in the store. Now that was bottled water worth the money.

[nolies74621]

Evian came from a tap in the basement of a grandmother living in Paris.

[IrishWench01]

I just saw it and absolutely love it. It just made me giggle!

[mitdgreenb]

I think it's the Moving Picture Company in London, not the Motion Picture Company. These guys: http://www.moving-picture.com/ Quality reporting CBS!