Here are a few screenhots rom A4, the second video to feature Skratchet, alongside Gobo, one of my oldest characters and the oldest character that I still work with.

This is a hand drawn, photoshop coloured cell animation, edited in After Effects and Premiere. It is styled on classic side-scrolling platformers, with lots of paralax-scrolling in the abckground. It's about their lives and how they're surviving, they go to see a film and talk about stuff. People thought it was funny. It got screened at Straight to Video 2 and the 2004 Brett Kebble Art Awards.

This is the first appearanc of Skratchet.

A very short (I think 53 sec) stop-frame animation called a.sort. He was simply obsessed with sweeping up dead bugs and things.

These are two different designs for the image on Skratchets t-shirt. The one with the rolling hills is closest to the one that made it onto the shirt for the sculpture featured in 'Bubbles', although I dropped the rainbow and the mauntains.

This was the second time I worked with Skratchet.
The first time was in the only claymation stop-frame animation that I ever made.

This was an installation called 'Bubbles' that was on the Spier wine estate for the second outdoor sculpture biennial they had there.

I later adapted it for indoor display with a wooden base that saved me from having to install the piece in the actual surroundings. cutting holes in the grass and genrally digging holes to sink supports into was no fun at all. Also, although I really liked the sculpture being in the same environment as the viewer when it was presented outside, it never worked quite as well for me indoors. I still haven't worked out why. I expect I shall figure it out soon.

I thought that I'd have finished this sculpture by now, but I have gotten involved in presenting a paper at a museums conference and its taking way longer to deal with than I'd anticipated. Writing is hard and even harder when you're as out of practice as I am. Art is easier, I can see the whole piece at one time.

Anyway, here are some pics I've been meaning to post of the construction of the sculpture that is nearly-but-not-yet finished. His name recently became Dash, and I think that this name will stick. I really like all of the dictionary definitions of the word. They fit his character.

One image shows his frame and the other shows the mess of polystyrene and polyeurahane that he is carved from before the shell layer is applied.