Tech Blog

Video Tech Blog #53: Insignia's hybrids

This past week, Insignia posted a note to Facebook trying to map out all hybrids by matching up all the driving styles he knew of: isolation, extension, cateye, antispin, pendulum, and CAP and going through them one-by-one till he'd identified all the combinations possible between them. Here is a demo of all the hybrids he listed (though I just realized I forgot cateye vs. CAP--whoops). Some of these have an interesting aesthetic value to them while some are just an utter pain in the ass.

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Video Tech Blog #52: Yuta-stall flowers, Icon tech, octagonal planes

This blog starts off with a demo of a 5-beat behind the back waistwrap that is still awkward and sloppy but I'm noticing I'm reaching for it in my BTB weaves now. Next is some explorations of the use of Yuta stalls to create horizontal flowers by stalling into an inversion rather than outswing as one usually does with this type of plane-bending. There's also some theory here as to how to use the Rastaxel stall shift pattern to create octagonal planes and finally a very special shout-out and a couple pieces of tech courtesy Mike Icon.

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Video Tech Blog #51: cateye flowers, antibrid cateye cross, CAP/antispin plane-bending

Starting off with an update on the pattern I showed off last week. Insignia had posted a comment about plane-bending in and out of it and here is a demo of the combination he mentioned. Also, I got a request for a demo of a cateye flower a couple weeks ago and here are four extrapolations of the idea. Ultimately one can look at this concept as either a flower with multiple points of rotation or as a variant on the unit circle grid idea. Please share thoughts on this as I haven't seen it demoed before.

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Video Tech Blog #50: flower-CAP stall switches, elliptical CAPs, atomics

Still practicing hyperloops--I feel like I've got a lot of catching up to do with this, so repetition is key. I've also added under the legs moves to my catchup game for beginner to intermediate skills. Beyond that, I keep finding more stuff I love to do with CAPs. First up is taking the flower stall switch from last week and instead switching to a CAP. In wallplane, it creates a really cool pattern that I want to play with more.

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Video Tech Blog #49: 1 year of tech blogs! Stall switches and G style plane-bending

My video blog is now a year old--huzzah! Starting off with a switch between hybrid stall switches and CAPs as shown by Mel in his latest performance video, I play around more with these types of stall switches and how you can plane shift with them or get in and out of them from any split-time same direction stall. Also, a stall pattern out of flowers demoed in a recent Nick Woolsey video, my hyperloops are looking better, and a short exploration of the type of horizontal antispin flower plane shifts that G has become famous for.

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G spins fire poi Sunday night at Burning Man 2009

An impromptu fire jam at Hookah Dome a few hours after the temple burn brought out some of the best and the brightest on the playa. Here is G doing a ton of plane-bends and stall shifting, as well as a brief glimpse of some of the diagonal planes he and Alien Jon have been working on.

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Video Tech Blog #48: split-time stall switches, plane-shifted CAPs, double staff

After an awesome couple weeks hanging out with some of my favorite poi spinners on the east coast, I've gotten to learn a lot about split-time stall shifts in the style of Rastaxel. Insignia has been taking these and adding a plane-bent flourish in the middle. I showed this pattern to Baz and he came up with an over the arm stall. I added a Yuta stall shift to Baz's motion and though it looks sloppy I've been having a lot of fun with it. I think I may have prematurely christened the spherical CAP--I described it by the pattern it adds up to rather than its component pieces.

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Video Tech Blog #47: more CAP plane-bending and CAP transition theory

At boomboat over the weekend, Christian pointed out to me that all my CAP plane-bending experiments had overlooked a very obvious possibility: performing a CAP in horizontal plane. This, it turns out, is also an awesome transition to diagonal plane CAPs. Also, A bizarre property of CAP transitions into full-arm movements. It turns out that the four basic combinations of timing and directions have three transition points with the most common CAPs, so halving a flower gives you three of the four combinations--not two. Any mathematicians can tell me why?

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Video Tech Blog #46: Old-school tech and quarter-beat stalls

Starting off with a couple tricks I'd consider to be a little bit older school style tech than I usually work with--the first is inspired by rope dart tricks that shoot the head off in the opposite direction it's been wrapped in. Next is a trick that uses releases to transition from meltdown to behind-the-back waistwraps and back. This is sketchy! Next, in order to get down the spherical CAPs I've been working on the past few weeks, I've been doing drills to get my hands used to doing quarter-beat stalls in same-time opposites.

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Video Tech Blog #45: airwraps and dissecting the spherical CAP

I'm trying to think if there are two more different skills I could have spent the last week playing with. Among the gaps in my knowledge are airwraps and how to get out of hyperloops. This week I finally set down to learn how this type of motion works and by and large the practice has been paying off. Also I've spent a lot of time working on the spherical CAP pattern I theorized about last week, breaking it down to each incremental movement.

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