Tech Blog

Drex's Tech Poi Blog #362: Straight Jackets

This is one of those moves that is so epically much more work than is ultimately worth it, but man is it bragging rights! Straight jackets are like crossers, but from a place where you arms are pretzeled around each other so you have almost no mobility. Part of the challenge is that it's nearly impossible to practice them without getting the entrance (from a barrel roll) down first. Not for the faint of heart--use soft poi!

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #361: How I make my Tech Blogs part 3 promotion and analytics

The final installment of my video series on how I make my tech blogs and the longest yet--this one covers how I promote my videos once they're published and how I gauge the success of them. Included here is information on monetization, how I get around restrictions on Facebook Pages, and why I don't post every video I make to Tech Poi or Reddit.

In situations where I want to share videos but I know I'll be on the road and unable to do it manually, I'll use Buffer for both Facebook and Twitter:
http://www.bufferapp.com

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #360: How I make my tech blogs part 2 Editing

Everything you ever wanted to know about how I make my videos, continuing with editing! This is a three-part series on everything that goes into my tech blogs and tutorials, including time spent on different elements, the technology and editing process, and promotion for my videos. This video focuses on the editing process, both for audio and video and the different software that I use for each. Coming next week: publishing and promoting my content.

Software that I use:
Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Adobe After Effects
iMovie

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #359: How I make my Tech Blog part 1 Inspiration and Shooting

Everything you ever wanted to know about how I make my videos, starting with inspiration and shooting! This is a three-part series on everything that goes into my tech blogs and tutorials, including time spent on different elements, the technology and editing process, and promotion for my videos. Coming next week: the editing process.

Inspiration:
Tech Poi Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/techpoi/
Reddit Poi: http://www.reddit.com/r/poi/
Google+ Poi: http://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/105824907484542224167

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #358: The Fantastic Four

I love poi moves with superhero names! This one's been on the back burner for a while, but checking out Tim Goddard's tutorial on the move broke down many of the barriers I'd been running up against. While looped in with supermans, I actually think this move is a slightly different beast, but an extremely useful one because it allows you to switch the planes your poi are moving in when spinning in a meteor fashion.

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #357: Ronan's multistep CAPs

At Tahoe, Ronan taught a class on 8-step CAPs that I was kind of in and out of due to some other commitments at the festival, but this was one of the moves I got out of it. I don't know if it qualifies as a dictionary-definition 8-step CAP given that only one hand in the pattern is actually performing a CAP at all, so I'm just going to label it a multistep CAP and call it a day. I found a way to do a similar pattern in diamond mode, so that's included here as well.

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #356: Contact rolls from isolated throws

Early in the festival season, Noel showed me an interesting entry to forearm contact rolls--using isolated throws going forwards rather than back. It puts the momentum of the tether right were it would be if you'd performed a pendulum in cradle, so the direction is already set. I didn't work much with it until Alan Lualdi showed me a use for it in a combo of his own making at PacFire. Intrigued, I came up with my own. All three variants can be found in this video.

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #355: 3-beat superman waistwrap

Spent a bunch of time working on this at Burning Man and Tahoe and finally have something worth seeing! Turning with a 3-beat superman is an interesting challenge because it frequently requires a type of counter rotation that can kill the momentum of the poi and therefore the move. Here are some tips on how to get around these problems--also, it was filmed in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life :)

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #354: 3-poi/meteor 1.5s

This was one move from Kate and Keith's 3-poi video that I found particularly confusing given that all the poi were the same color, so puzzling out which poi was doing what couldn't happen until I saw someone else doing the same move in real life. That guy was my friend Willow, who showed me the technique you see in the video for putting this move together. It bears a lot of similarities to Nicky Evers' wavy weaves and requires a knowledge of thumb-led reverse meteor 2-beats.

 

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #353: Superman antispin and hybrid flowers

An awesome connect the dots moment! Previously on my tech blog we played around with the idea of doing 3-beat weaves with supermans. We can apply this same idea to flowers by turning the superman into a body-traced 4-petal antispin flower or 2-petal inspin flower. You can then combine it with the other hand to get either a pair of antispins or a hybrid flower along the lines of VTG tech!

 

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