As a memento to our now demolished studio a good friend of id-iom came down to document our work at the 'House of Pain(t)' before it was razed to the ground. Here's a video he put together in the final days of the house..

We have already put the still photo of 'Cliff was visibly upset...' up on our flickr (www.flickr.com/id-iom) but now, after a little tinkering with our Super 8 footage, we have the pleasure of bringing you the moving picture version. If you're not satisfied - you can have your 1 minute 55 back! If, like me, you can clearly remember the first time you watched Oliver Stone's 'Platoon' then the death of Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) is a pretty emotional scene where Adagio for Strings is playing over footage of a wounded Sgt. Elias trying to escape from the Viet Cong but ultimately getting mowed down in a hail of gunfire. I felt my dramatic fall was entirely reminiscent of this epic scene so felt a small homage would be worthy for inclusion in our humble production. For my fact of the day I've learned that the iconic image of Sgt Elias with his hands in the air is actually a recreation of a famous 1968 war photo by Art Greenspon. So there you go! Cheers id-iom

A stencil we did for the Big Draw's 10th Birthday

Hmmmm. How to explain Stormbird. I'm not really sure if any explanation I can give can adequately describe our thought processes when creating this stop-motion epic. The 'storyline' just kind of suggested itself. It's probably easier to explain it's conception than how we developed such a monster. It came about when we had id-iom's good friend Dave over from LA for a while. He's known for doing a bit of video production/editing so after consumption of a few beers down at the studio we (stupidly) decided that a short stop-motion video might be a good idea. It wasn't. After over 2600 shots over the best part of a week in the freezing cold basement making just one tiny adjustment after another we were close to death by exposure but were finally able to call it a wrap. There is plenty of footage which ended up on the cutting room floor that will hopefully never see the light of day as it's more than a little weird and would probably emotionally scar any viewer for life. And all that took long hours of standing around in the cold that i'll never get back. I bet the Aardman animation studios are all cosy and warm. If i'm ever to attempt anything like this again I'll be making sure it's warm outside or we have such mod cons as central heating... Anyway, once principal photography was finished we realised we needed some musical accompaniment befitting of such a creation so we put out the call and came up with 3 very different soundtracks. The first version will probably not play in certain countries on youtube as The Man probably has certain copyright issues as it features tracks that are already out there but that's where our other versions come in as both feature an original score which should play internationally no problem. What else can we say about the video apart from the fact that it features anthropomorphic spray cans, the Graffiti Removal Squad (first featured here), sharks (one of which is gay but we had a hard time portraying that!), Tom Selleck (although I like to think he's in his Thomas Magnum persona), a fireball (from Streetfigher 2 obviously) and, of course, the plucky little robin a.k.a the storm bird in Norse mythology. Finally, whilst I like to think our video has a certain naive rustic charm there are those who treat the subject with a little more professionalism. So for those who haven't seen it here's a little link to a much more polished creation featuring light stencils by our good man Pahnl. Cheers id-iom

After walking past the invader piece one day the thought just popped into small little brains. What after so many Science Fiction are aliens looking for when they come to planet earth? COWS. So after a little bit of hard work here it is - The Invader Cow Cheers id-iom ps Thanks to Invader for the germ of an idea and a great bit of street work!