To see a World in a Grain of Sand Rice
– William Blake mh
If you are on TikTok (or a fan of talk shows) at the moment then, no doubt, your feed has included coloured rice being tossed in the air in the form of song lyrics, beloved cartoon characters, and even famous faces.
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| @mr.riceguy |
Whilst coloured rice is not a new thing (for most preschool teachers, it is a cheap and effective way to keep kids entertained), a bunch of TikTok-ers have made a living off turning this simple play-thing into a full-on career. And, obviously, when a current trend is well-suited to our logo, we have to give it a go. Here’s how we got there:
What we used
- Rice
- Our whole logo only needed 500g, however, we needed a few attempts to get it right and ended up using about 3kg. White rice is reusable, a jumble of multi-coloured rice, not so much…
- Food colouring
- Vinegar
- 1 teaspoon per cup of rice
- Large (relatively stiff) rice tossing surface
- We used a shelf from our cupboard…
How we did it
- We started by colouring the rice
- We mixed 4 cups of rice with 4 teaspoons of vinegar and added food colouring until we got to the colour we wanted. The vinegar helps the colour spread evenly and get absorbed by the rice, so that, when playing with it, the colour doesn’t stain your fingers.
- Once mixed well (and to your colour-liking), we then dried the rice on trays lined with paper towel. The thinner the layer, the quicker it dries. Ours took about 2 hours.
- We scaled and sketched our logo onto the board
- If we had had a projector, this would have been a much quicker + easier process, but alas.
- Note that the image that you sketch out on the board will be reversed when tossed into the air. We drew the logo on in the correct orientation and then simply flipped the footage in editing
- Practice makes perfect
- We had a few attempts with random shapes, just using white rice, so that we could practise the flip motion (and then could reuse the white rice)
- We found the trick was to not raise the board too aggressively, but drop it as quickly as possible
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| “TEST” |
- Once we were happy with our flipping technique, we then created our logo using the coloured rice.
- We packed the rice relatively densely to make sure that, when tossed, the logo came out as clear and vibrant as possible.
- We got the cameras set up to capture the magic.
- We used both a GoPro + the SlowMo setting on an iPhone. Whilst both worked, slowing down the GoPro footage in editing gave us better quality.
- The next step was to toss our Canary logo
- It took us 3 solid attempts to get our final result (with plenty of sweeping in between)
- We did not put down a sheet to capture the rice (because…yolo), but we would recommend this method (unless you plan on finding runaway rice in all of your living room crevices for the next few days)
Ultimately…
Verdict
Easy and cheap way to get creative (and certainly gave us a good laugh). Would recommend.