One of the first computer packages I learnt thoroughly was a programme written by Electronic Arts, called, 'DeluxePaint II'. On the outside it looked remarkably straight forward. The standard tools, circles, squares, lines, paintbrushes etc., it was only when I investigated further I discovered an astonishing number of features, hidden deep among the menu bars.

This feature gave me the idea to produce a piece of work arranged around the theme of, Doctor Who.

I wanted to produce an animation which would create a feeling of movement. I wanted the Doctors' to blend and merge together, showing the history of the characters, starting from the very first Doctor progressing through to the present day (at that time there were only seven of them!).

Each character was drawn by hand with pencil and paper, and then scanned using a hand scanner. The Tardis was then drawn using a varying sizes so that when they were all stitched together it would suggest regression and time delay.

By creating a fixed palette I was then able to get the cycling right, so that when the colours of each image started to disappear they would be replaced with a new slide. It took a lot of fiddling and arranging but in the end I was pretty pleased with the result.

The Doctor Who project, propelled me into creating more animation's, one of which turned out to be 'Norman', a little character inspired by , 'Lemmings' which I addictively played every day.

At the time an animation was needed to go onto the cover of a computer disk, to introduce the company 'Dead Smart Software'. I thought up the idea of an empty billboard which opened up on the screen. A character, later to become Norman would scuttle on from 'stage left' carrying a bundle of posters, ascend the ladder, which was leant up against the board, paste the poster onto the billboard, descend, then exit 'stage right' (the poster, announcing, Dead Smart Software). Sounded pretty straight forward, but of course it wasn't!

We had just bought a piece of software by 'Expert Software', called 'Expert Animator', which of course was a basic animation package. The animation's were composed of a background image which had to be no larger than 320 x 200 x 256 colours. You could then introduce characters onto your background, by bringing them in as 'Sprites' (you were allocated a maximum of 12 in all). You could then have the sprite move across the screen by creating a path for it to follow, then specifying how many frames were needed, judge the speed that your sprite would move across the screen (the higher the number, the slower the sprite). Unfortunately the manual which accompanied the software was pretty basic and just took you through a stock animation of a flying bumble bee.

Norman was proving to be a problem! I discovered that the programme allocated 32 colours of the palette as 'opaque', causing Norman to mysteriously disappear every time he passed by these colours. Another problem was keeping the file sizes down. Each sprite had to be carefully choreographed, so when Norman walked across the screen and got to the ladder, he triggered off another sprite which would climb so far up then set off another and another etc. By the end of the exercise I was seeing whole armies of Norman's every time I closed my eyes!

After Norman, I needed a rest from sprites and cycles. I wanted to start producing a range of Christmas cards, based along the theme of really bad jokes (you know the ones that make your toes curl!). I decided to call the range
'Crimbo Cringers'. This series was entirely designed using 'Deluxe Paint II', using a basic 256 palette.

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