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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #168: 3D Flowers

Here's a popular viewer request: the 3D flowers that Mel was doing at the end of his "Red Pants" video. These flowers are based in the idea of having the poi spinning in a different plane than the hand and therefore creating a spiral or worm-shaped profile for the viewer. Tank and I played with a similar concept two years ago at Firedrums, but placed the poi plane in wall rather than horizontal plane.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #167: Keith's Negative Space Tricks

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Here's a recap of one of my favorite classes from Firedrums: Keith Marshall's class on negative space. These are two of the tricks we covered that are both cyclical so they're repeatable. The first is relatively simple using a non-native frame and the second can be performed with a contact roll creating a native side frame.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #166: horizontal cateye antibrid stacking

Beginning the process of downloading all the tech from the past three weeks. This is a trick that Asaf (Poiboi) came up with that we used for a lot of our tunneling both at Kinetic and at Firedrums. The idea is to take horizontal cateye vs isolation and utilize some horizontal stacking to switch to the same move on the other side of the body. The spacing works due to that quirk of antispin flowers wherein they put the poi a unit circle distance apart 1/6th of the way around the handpath.

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Video Tech Blog #164: Hybrid families

This is an expansion of an idea from a previous video: when you take 3 downbeat flowers and perform them at a 2-poi length handpath, 1/6 of the way around the handpath there is a point where the distance between the intercept for the hand and its reflection across the horizontal axis of the pattern is one poi length. If we vary the combinations and phasing of 3 downbeat patterns, we wind up creating the alignments of all the major unit circle hybrids. Here are 4 examples of how this cool quirk of geometry can be used. Major thanks to Charlie for the help in figuring this one out.

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Video Tech Blog #163: STSD 8-step hybrid

More STSD hybridy goodness! This time I'm taking the concept of an 8-step CAP with it a little more literally and utilizing the space created by CAP vs BTH static to take the CAP hand around in an 8-step pattern while maintaining the STSD synchronization with the BTH hand.

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Video Tech Blog #162: out of phase STSD hybrids

Taking a concept I've done and done to death, I wanted to add some out of phase flavoring to it. Taking the idea of the same time same direction hybrid Yuta taught me at Firedrums last year, I'm switching it up so that each hand has a different axis to perform its petals on and working through them in quarters. It's got a nifty quarter-time feel to it even as the poi stay in same time same direction all the way around.

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Video Tech Blog #161: tunnel stacking

Guest-starring Noel Yee from the Vulcan Crew! We spent the weekend in rural Georgia at the inaugural FLAME Festival, tinkering around with stacking and tunneling between workshops. Here, the two of us demonstrate one of the patterns we came up with that involves each person turning with either an inspin or an antispin flower, alternating with pendulums to create a really kickin' interference pattern. Sorry in advance for the audio--we really were trying to project but it was damned windy out!

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Video Tech Blog #160: Contact roll weave

This one has been rolling around in my head for a long time...trying to make a contact roll one of the beats of a reverse 3-beat weave and it's a doozy. The idea here is to substitute an elbow pit catch and roll where you would normally have the beat under to the other side and instead have your native hand lead the turn back to its own side. Ironically, after woodshedding the hell out of this trick and seeing it on video I think it may not actually be as visually compelling as the amount of work it takes to make it happen. Oh, well :-P

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Video Tech Blog #159: Charlie's octahedron

This is something Charlie showed me nearly a year ago and that I hadn't really been working on that hard until recently. Geometrically, it's possible to go through each vertex of an octahedron without repeating any segments and Charlie had created an exercise wherein one does plane-shifts between each of these vertices to define an octahedron via constant 90 degree shifts. Here I demo two of the easier variants in same time same direction, split time same direction, and Charlie's preferred method of quarter-time. Be forewarned: this shit is hard!

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Video Tech Blog #158: Timing and direction changes in odd-petaled flowers

Here's an attempt to tie together a whole bunch of different threads from some recent videos both myself and some others have made. First up, e6 posted a video over the weekend about timing and direction where he pointed out the difficulties in making the traditional T&D combinations work with flowers that have an odd number of petals. In an odd bit of synchronicity, Justin Benson posted a video displaying an example of just that--wherein he takes a pentagram into split opposites by creating two pentagrams that reflect each other across a given axis.

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