A few weeks ago, Arashi asked me to post this video I'd taken of the first seven minutes of his class at Firedrums. My camera was running out of battery at the time, so regrettably I didn't get much more, but you all might appreciate some Arashi tech straight from the horse's mouth :)

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Here's part two of my wrap-up from Arashi's Firedrums class. This covers how you can use the poi plane and cross points to build polygons rather than using the traditional trochoid method of defining polygon sides with an arc and corners with loops/petals. The implications of this are really cool because they allow you to build polygons that present an image in three dimensions rather than the flat shapes we normally work with.

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Here's my first tutorial breaking down some of the tech Arashi laid down in his class at Firedrums. Here we're just dealing with some basic plane-bends that create some nifty diagonal shapes and the concept of using cross points in places we don't normally stick them. You'll see more than a few ideas here that have also popped up in Alien Jon and G vids, so think of this as a basic tutorial on how to start aiming planes as much as we aim flower petals.

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This past week, Zan posted a great video on diagonal planes that included an exercise that does an amazing job of cleaning up diagonals--seriously, well done :) Playing with diagonals has me thinking about having planes offset by degree differences other than 0, 90 or 180, and here is an example of plane switching between planes at are offset by degrees based in 3 or 5 rather than 4. Next, over the weekend, Chris Rovo showed me a pattern he'd been working on wherein an atomic flower switches to atomic weave and over to another atomic flower.

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A couple updates from moves of the past week: a quarter-time float out of the now-familiar stall-switch pattern and learning how to plane-shift in same direction. This leads to an atomic weave performed in diagonal planes, which I demo a variant of the Notcoleman3 in here. Finally, a couple thoughts on "hard" versus "soft" transitions based upon charlicopter's 9-square poi theory videos. There is definitely some potential here and I like the idea of moving between grids as well as adding pendulums into the mix.

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No, I regret this isn't an entry on Warren Ellis's landmark sci-fi satire comic book series (I'm still figure out a way to make it apply to poi ;), the title is a great excuse to give it a plug. The planetary I'm talking about is the system by which planets rotate around a solar mass and create systems of compound elliptical orbits.

After an exhausting but wonderfully fun and educational weekend at the PEX Summer Festival, I've got a whole bunch of new tech courtesy the patient guidance of Richmond's Lucas Boyd. First up is a plane-bending exercise I've started playing with to explore all three planes by transitioning between them with floats. I've got same-time same direction and same-time opposites so far. After that, some cool CAP effects including a way to transition between CAPS using linear extensions, which also adds one more type of CAP turn to those I demoed in my tutorial a few weeks ago.

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A demo of the cube Charlie demonstrated for me at Wildfire--this takes seven plane shifts to accomplish and works through crossed arms, wall plane, and buzzsaw positions. A real challenge, but a fun one! Next up is a plane-changing pattern that works between opposites same-time and corkscrew into a kind of pendulum stall before reversing itself into the exact same pattern it started as. I really like how the reverse of this pattern is itself, whereas reversing most poi sequences require you to reverse the directions of all your movements.

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A combination of stuff inspired this--first, in pursuit of a unit sphere, I've failed miserably to find a construct that would fit the requirements of it, but many of the experiments I've worked through in the process have proven interesting in their own right. One such example is the 3D pyramid pattern from my last video post, which I suppose is technically a triangular tetrahedron. Taking Cyrille's law that all poi polygons should be symmetrical with two poi, I've been working out ways of using plane-bending and stalls to achieve this end. Here are a couple results:

Starting off with an utterly bizarre pattern--the same-time opposites CAP performed with the extension in wall plane and the antispin petal in corkscrew plane. The idea for this came from a post Dyami made about the idea of a unit sphere on the Tech Poi forum of Tribe.net. I think the concept is a dead-end, but trying to prove it has led to some really interesting patterns, including a 3D triquetra I play with in here. Also, the transition from butterfly top-stall to hybrid that I couldn't include last week is in here and finally I'm working turns into my stall intensive.

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