The trouble with the rise of the YouTube Video Essayist™ is that everybody wants to be the next Defunctland or Hbomberguy, but all the wannabes know is how to be an influencer, so the resulting video essays are always really about themselves. You’ll get a forty-five-minute video with maybe fifteen minutes of actual, topical information padded out with half an hour of tedious theatrics about how hard it was to do research for the video and how nobody wanted to talk to them, and I’m just sitting here like “yeah, dude, it was hard because you don’t know how to perform research, and nobody wanted to talk to you because your behaviour toward your prospective sources amounted to borderline harassment, and that’s how it looks in your own version of events which has clearly been spun for optics – I can’t even imagine how badly you must have gone about this in reality”.
some have pointed out that cathy didnt create the original 3D model. that is true, and I would love to know the origins of that! but that isn't what I wanted to figure out with this video; i set out to learn who created the GIF specifically, i.e rotated it, edited it, made it into a .gif and posted it online.
The video starts off with an impressively detailed account of how the dancing baby gif was made, including the people, the companies, and the software involved with the animations as well as the assets. It then goes on to identify precisely 1 of the links in that chain for trumpet skeleton.
The whole "research" was a reverse image search, then checking the internet archive for the earliest date the gif was posted, then he forgot to check the history of the one website that most looked like the original source and spammed reddit for help until someone pointed him to that same page