Many moons ago I did a video on isolated throws and catches that began moving into the world of behind the back catches, but it wasn't until recently that I was really motivated to practice enough to add this trick solidly to my repertoire. Here are a couple of the tricks I've been using to make this trick more solid.

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w00t for the new flowcord! Some of you guys may have noticed that about three months ago I switched up the leashes on my contact poi from the colecord I'd been using for more than a year. The reason was I dropped by the Flowspace in Berkeley, California after Burning Man and Sean and I spent an afternoon figuring out how to make this awesome new type of cord they had work with my contact poi. I'm pleased to announce those experiments were successful and now you can buy kits to create these leashes and handles straight from Flowtoys themselves! 

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This is a trick that Cyrille and Poiboi have both made use of a lot that I'm a big fan of--it's a pair of inner arm rolls performed such that the arms start spread out and then come together to perform the catch. As I worked through this, my original conception of the trick was to have the planes of the handles and tether flush with the back of my arm, but I realized as I played with it that instead the planes had to be at a slightly oblique angle as the direction of the head follows the angle of the tether in contact.

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The companion video to Tech Blog 200--this one on how to find hybrid families using QFT (poi) notation. I highly recommend watching this in 720 and full screen so you can see all the numbers on the whiteboard. For some background, I highly recommend checking out my blog entry on the basics of QFT here:

http://drexfactor.com/weirdscience/2011/05/18/beginners_guide_poi_qft_no...

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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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I forgot to bring my tripod to the studio, so the vid on finding hybrid families using QFT will have to wait for the next video. In the meantime, here's a nifty transition that takes elements from patterns that Ronan and G play with and merges them together in a fun and creative way. It utilizes CAP vs pendulum and lets you switch which hand is performing which move.

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200 tech blogs! This one is on how I've been working to create the hybrid families I've been frequently featuring in my videos over the course of the past year--I have two methods I use these days and this is the more visual one: finding the "lines" of the poi tricks to figure out how to switch between them. Sorry for the weird cuts--I had to get it under 15 minutes :-P

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An idea from a previous blog I wanted to explore a little bit more: the pendulum stall chasers from a few tech blogs ago included a brief note on using said trick as a transition between horizontal and vertical stacking. Here I explore the transition from the horizontal stack in a little bit more detail, taking my two favorite stacks and figuring out the transitions in and out of them into this pattern.

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I've been mapping out hybrids lately that utilize a relationship between the hands and realized I'd been assuming the handle was synonymous with the hands. I then started to think about cases in which the handles could be together but not necessary have the hands together. The first hybrid I played with seemed too easy, so I started doing it with an outer forearm roll and it led both to  isolation vs extension and triquetra vs pendulum hybrids.

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Over the weekend I started messing around with a slightly different approach to triquetra vs pendulum and found it opened up some transition points I rarely use but found to be really fun to incorporate into my flow. In this case I was playing with triquetra vs pendulum with the hands in opposites same-time and looking to the transition points on either side of the pattern, which can access static vs extension or same time same direction hybrids.

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