$1,218 Raised of $8,500 Goal

Just like a puzzle, there were many tiny pieces put together to create this Kickstarter video, each one with its own challenges. It was a month-long process, created by just two people–myself and my awesome summer intern, Silvia.

Creativity is a funny thing. You come up with an idea. You believe it’s THE idea. Yet it morphs and grows every minute. Sometimes it leads you in a circle, right back to where you started. Sometimes it changes into something completely different.

The original idea was to have a “flour explosion”. A big “POOF!” moment at the beginning of the video, then as the flour dissipated, you’d see the imprint of the tiny book in the flour. We tried throwing the flour at the camera, having the flour fall onto a surface, blowing it, throwing it up in the air, even considered putting flour in a balloon and popping the balloon. But in every attempt, the flour was too light, it fell too slowly, and not in the direction we wanted it to.

On the last attempt, I said “What if we use the imprint, just like we did for the still shot, but instead, we blow the imprint off the surface? That’ll be easy, right?” Yet flour has binding powers that make it want to stick.

We tried a balloon pump, hair dryer, vacuum cleaner, air compressor…none of which would blow the flour from a foot away. The final trick? A nitrogen tank. The nitrogen tank paired with speeding up the video frame rate created the first video clip. THEN we had to figure out how to get the video to play backwards!

The nice thing about creativity always being in motion is it leads you in places you wouldn’t expect. The last clip in the video came from the experimenting that led to the solution. When I saw the clip, I immediately said “That should be the last frame of the video. Let’s keep it.” Then we moved onto filling in the rest of the blanks.

Want to see this tiny cookbook come to life? As Kickstarter has proven many times over, every little bit helps.

Please contribute, share, like, comment, or simply wish us luck!

Behind the Scenes–Attempting a flour explosion. July 17th, 2014