Linux Babies

I created this animation almost one and a half years ago for a friend of mine (Juliux) when his first little baby was born. Juliux likes a lot Open Source technologies (in fact he inspired me to go and learn open source technologies and software when I was in the university, well maybe I'm not that good student... I still use Windows), so I thought at that time that maybe if I make some of the famous Open source characters babies, that will be right for the occasion, so I started the project.

First I started with Tux, with Tux I don't have too much problems because the Tux character it's already established. I just make some of the face features smaller, like the eyes and the head, I also added the "Bobo" (that thing that babies likes a lot).

Then I followed with the baby MySQL dolphin, just like Tux, the dolphin character was already established in some way, so I keep it simple and draw small features like the eyes, the mouth and the fins.

Now the problems started, the Apache baby. With the Apache baby I just had the Apache feather to take inspiration from, and that was enough, I just have to draw a Apache baby of the people that lived in the US. Again I keep the character simple with small features and details.

With the Red Hat character, just like Apache I only had the Hat.  Then I draw a baby using that big hat :)

Finally the Firefox baby fox. With this one I watched some photos of real fox babies and then I came with the final character design.

So I had the characters, but now I have to put them in some situation or to do something. Then I remembered the toy that spins above the babies little bed, just like the one that appears in the Toy Story movie!

I think I wrote too much about the creative and design process of this animation that I forgot to talk about how it was achieved in Flash. Well I started with and spend the most of the time in designing the characters in Flash, after that I added the animation of the characters moving around, some people that first watched this animation thought that it was achieved using some complex ActionScript code, but is not, actually is very simple.

I just applied some motion tween to the character moving from one side to the other, then I scaled the character to simulate some depth in a kind of orbit effect. Then I applied another motion tween similar to the first one but in opposite direction. To make the effect believable I used two layers for each character one for the character moving in the front and the other for the character moving behind.

Finally I added some button to control the animation and that's it!

The animation: