A lesson on plane shifting including basic components, building blocks, and a few examples. In honor of a departed member of the poi community.

tutorialplaneshifting.mp4

At Wildfire, Charlie and Baz came up with an interesting pattern that switches between right angles similar to some stacking patterns Ronan demonstrated earlier this year. I noticed that one side-effect of the pattern was that it forced the poi head to follow the length of the leash when switching positions, and started looking for other patterns that exhibited this same characteristic. Here is the first one that I've found.

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Over the weekend at Wildfire, we played around some more with Mel's top stall vs. pendulum pattern from the "Red Pants" video. Charlie found an interesting inversion of it wherein the leading hand performs a float rather than a topstall, making the internal alignment on each side a hand to poi relationship rather than hand to hand, thus allowing you to drop out of the move into static spin vs extension or a host of other moves. Even better, it's totally easy to switch between both variants.

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Remember that funky thing I played with last week that combined elements of CAPs, floats, stalls, and extensions? Well I put it into wallplane and found that just like it's wheelplane cousin, it opens up the doors to lots of transitions to wallplane CAPs, antispins, plane-shifts, and more. This pattern is reminding me more and more of Charlie's concept of totipotent patterns that can switch between timing and direction combinations.

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While I was in Africa, I started playing with a funky pattern wherein one makes like they're going to do a CAP after 3/4 of an extension circle only to use the antispin petal as a stall and pull back out of it into a float. Putting it together with both hands results in a pattern that has some CAP-like qualities but ends in each hand and poi head being pointed straight out from center, opening up some interesting possibilities for transitions.

techblog113.mp4

In his "Red Pants" video, Mel demonstrated a trick wherein he alternated hands performing pendulum and top stalls to create a cool pattern that switches between the relationship of hands to each other and poi to each other. Erik reminded me of this trick before I left for the playa and we spent a whole afternoon messing with it at Vulcantown during Burning Man. We added floats, isolated pendulums, plane shifts, and more to it. Here are all the variants I can remember.

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Another set of ideas that came out of geeking at Wildfire with Noel and Charlie: this time using point isolations matched up with pendulum stalls to create a fascinating isolation effect when switching from side to side with pendulums. We also found the same movement rendered a unit circle apart yields a funky S-curve that could be used for timing and direction changes with the pendulums. Fun! :)

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Another move from this year's Firedrums. Kate from Florida came up with this one, that takes the old stall chase exercise and adds a twist to it by switching between the stall chase and a split-time opposites stall. It reminds me a bit of another variant on the stall chasing that Mel does, but has a rather unique flair that I dig. Enjoy! :)

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I'm back from Firedrums and managed to get a lot of footage of the event, though not nearly all the footage that I wanted to capture. One of the classes I really enjoyed was Russ's class on hybrids, though I think the patterns he taught us were actually much closer to being CAPs. Here are the patterns from that class--enjoy! :)

techblog86.mp4

Before I take off for Firedrums for the week, I wanted to post a little tech bit I got the inspiration for last week. We take G's hybrid stall out of the C-CAP as the root of a plane shift into CAPs behind the back and head. Arms are same-time opposites and poi are split-time same direction. Done cleanly I think this would make for a real eye-popping stunt and it sets up perfectly for returning to the original C-CAP in wheel plane.

techblog85.mp4