Brighton-based digital arts partnership Moshi Machine has narrowly missed out on a Channel 4 award after turning belly-button fluff into punk-style animation.

The business, set up last year by Alistair Macdonald and Rona Innes, made the final of the animation category of Unleash the Talent, organised by public relations company Ketchum in conjunction with Tango and Channel 4.

Its Fluffer animation made the final after beating off hundreds of other entries in the categories of short film, animation and mixed media.

The animation was screened at a special awards ceremony for the three finalists at The Drum cinema at Channel 4.

Mr Macdonald said: "Although we hoped it would raise our profile, we were just doing it for a laugh and we were surprised when we got shortlisted."

He said the idea for the animation had come from an unlikely source.

"A Japanese friend kept asking Rona why English men always had fluff in their belly-buttons because Japanese men never do.

"We came up with the animation by way of explanation."

The animation tells the tale of a worm, which lives inside your belly spinning belly button fluff.

As the story develops, it becomes more demented and the story ends with a belly-button fluff tug-o-war, inside and outside the belly.

The frames for the animation were originally drawn by hand with pencil before being scanned and imported into Flash software. The vector images were then crudely animated to give the two-minute cartoon a strong strobe effect.

Mr Macdonald said although the animation process was time consuming the film was created in just over a week, including a day for local sound designers Roast Jesus to record a specially-created soundtrack.

The partnership's name comes from the Japanese telephone greeting "Moshi Moshi" and is supposed to mean "Hello, Computer".

Moshi Machine special-ises in animation, illustration and programming for clients from punk bands to blue chip multinationals. The team also designs web sites.

www.moshimachine.co.uk