Well, well, well. Look who’s shown their face after all this time. Storm Bird is back and is angrier than ever. You may recognise the feisty little redbreast from short films such as Storm Bird (Dave’s remix).
With the very recent reintroduction of sunshine, I decided to do a bit of gardening to try and alleviate the relentless monotony induced by having to stay indoors all the time. Gardening has never been my strong suit and Storm Bird was more than happy to point out every single one of my glaring mistakes.
First, the worms weren’t fat enough and that was my fault for not feeding them sufficiently. Then the caterpillar turned out to be poisonous and how dare I try and get the mighty Storm Bird to eat tainted food? The list of my errors went on and on and on.
For 5 hours straight whilst I was toiling away in the garden I had Storm Bird continuously berate me for a myriad of different things including (but not limited to): being too slow, being too fast, not admiring his golden red plumage enough, staring at him too much, not listening, making too many cups of tea, interacting with the neighbours and pretty much a constant barrage of insults regarding my hairstyle. Really quite uncalled for if I say so myself.
She’s A2 in size and on high quality Bockingford paper and made using the magic of imagination, acrylic, spray paint, paint pen and watercolour. That’s about all I can give you on this one…
The fruits of today’s labour consists of a couple of newly commissioned prints which will shortly be ready to grace the walls at their new residence.
The Call of Duty
If you’ve ever played Call of Duty online and you’re about as good as I am (which isn’t to say i’m rubbish but I’m definitely a casual player as opposed to a hardcore 6-hours-a-day dedicated type) then you will undoubtedly have come up against an opponent much like the commissioner of this picture.
He works exclusively with a sniper rifle and will take you out before you’ve even seen him. Then take out the rest of your team too. To reflect this highly annoying level of skill we created a Call of Duty themed print that I’m pretty sure will hit the spot. Featuring all the deadly weaponry you can think of and his gamer tag I can only hope it’s an inspiration on the rare occasions when things aren’t going his way…
Storm Bird (pretty in pink)
Our next piece was commissioned for a young lady – hence the very fetching pink colour. It’s a one-off special of our Storm Bird print which was originally created as thank you for the good folks who helped us out with the creation of our video. And if you haven’t seen the video then you can turn the sound up and sit back for a couple of minutes of graffiti based oddness (featuring the god-like being of Tom Selleck – what more could you want?):
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. The other video’s will follow this in short order and we’d really love some feedback on which one people prefer (so watch this space)…
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.
Someone got in touch with us asking if we’d done any Star Wars related imagery on the street for possible inclusion in a book on the topic. Since then I’ve watched ‘Revenge of the Sith‘ for the first time and was quite relieved after the horror of Jar Jar Binks that George Lucas can actually still make a decent film. So with renewed vigour and a little more faith in the whole Star Wars franchise I made a quick check of the id-iom archives and we managed to locate a few bits that could potentially be of use and then set to work putting them up and getting some snaps.
Nobody understands me
R2D2 has a problem. Nobody can really understand him. They all pretend they do just to keep him happy but his tweets and whistles are completely unintelligible and they only keep him round because he knows how to make a decent mojito…
Don't be a puppet for the Empire!
Graffiti on cardboard found in a clonetrooper training area on Kamino. Despite an intensive search the culprit was never found… The search continues.
Join the Empire and see the Galaxy
An enlistment/propaganda poster from the walls of a drinking establishment in Coruscant.
Galactic Foreign Policy
A cheeky bit of political graffiti from the mean streets of Tatooine. Stick it to the Man!
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