For the past three years, I've been collecting statistics every six months on the most popular poi channels I'm aware of to gauge interest and overall industry health. Last year, I expanded this survey to include Facebook likes and this year it's expanded to include Instagram followers as well. Overall, the industry picture is good with overall subscribers and views up since the same time last year.
So clearly it's been two months now since I sent my last newsletter out--my apologies, my travels kept me much busier than I had hoped but I will try and be better about staying in touch from here on out! Here's what's new in my world:
This morning, I’ve seen a whole lot of my friends linking to this article about the amount of money that YouTube stars make. The general consensus has been that many of them are in the wrong line of work and that riches and stardom are simply a clever YouTube channel away.
Six months ago I started up a little experiment, trying to crowdfund resources from the community to assist me in making my many video projects. Between tech blogs, tutorials, double staff tech blogs and tutorials, Profiles in Poi, The Month in Flow, Slow Mo Monday, and Stop Drop and Spins, I spend a whole lot of my time creating these video projects for the wider world.
Something a little different...I've had a pretty rough winter and wanted to put it into movement. This is a piece I choreographed back in January.
Sadly, YouTube has become an absolute shit-show if you're using any kind of music at all in your videos, so the original audio for this song was blocked on it. Fortunately, I can put whatever audio I want behind video on my own site, so enjoy! :)
For two years now, FLAME Festival has offered a unique experience inside the flow/fire festival world in that we allow our attendees to help us determine our lineup. Last year was our first time trying out this experiment and we learned a lot from doing it--a lot of what worked and a lot of what didn’t work. This year, in an effort to improve upon the system we created last year we set out to take many of those lessons learned and apply them to voting and teacher selection to do our best to assemble the best festival the Southeastern United States has ever seen.
These have been a long-time coming! Three years ago, my friend Memory suggested I put some of the poi patterns I'd been creating in my simulators on a t-shirt. At one point, I nearly put one design out but found the printing quality wasn't up to my standards. Then, last month I put out four images that I quite enjoyed on both my Facebook and my Instagram, asking my followers to vote on their favorites.
In the past couple months I've been posting extended versions of my Profiles in Poi interviews through the DrexFactor store. These have included longer versions of the interviews as well as the uncut b-roll of each artist spinning that I edit in to each interview. Today I've added the extras for Justin Warren and Christina Koller, so that each and every interview I did in 2014 is available for download.
I hope those of you who live in the Northern states have been keeping warm this winter--the cold weather definitely puts a cramp in practicing and rehearsing. With Spring hopefully around the corner, thoughts will be turning toward fire festivals and good times with friends. Here are some highlights of this month as we look to the next!
Two weeks ago marked a very auspicious anniversary for me--I filmed and published my 400th tech blog! When I published my very first tech blog on September 8, 2008, I could scarcely have imagined that six years and some change later that it would have grown into the institution that it has. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that despite offering a host of other content and trying to experiment with the form that my tech blog was and still is the cornerstone of my offerings to the poi world.
These have been a long-time coming! Three years ago, my friend Memory suggested I put some of the poi patterns I'd been creating in my simulators on a t-shirt. At one point, I nearly put one design out but found the printing quality wasn't up to my standards. Then, last month I put out four images that I quite enjoyed on both my Facebook and my Instagram, asking my followers to vote on their favorites.