Buzzsaw fountains were one of my favorite challenges in my first year of spinning poi and it wasn't until much later that I realized they were creating some of the basic skills necessary to get into inversions and barrel rolls later. Here is how you can practice this type of movement and get set up inside moves.

buzzsawfountaintutorial.mp4

Taking threads from the past three weeks worth of videos: how to chain together the forwards weave, reverse weave, windmill, and weave turn together into a fountain variant that has some body tracer elements. This move can be done either inspin or antispin and sets up a lot of great moves down the line.

4beatfountain.mp4

In an attempt to take some elements of snaking into a vertical place, I stumbled into a pattern that seemed to make use of both negative space framing as well as creating some lovely moments of isolation. I had a hard time figuring out how to do it on the opposite side of my body (hence re-recording this tech blog), but the results make for a very satisfying fusion of body tracer, negative space, and fountain.

techblog229.mp4

Sorry about the audio! Earlier this week, Alien Jon posted a video on a concept he was calling pulseweaves--an intersection between linear extensions and 3-beat weaves. Based upon his idea, I've been playing with a fountain that utilizes the grid we're familiar with playing with from elliptical CAPs. It has a funky side-effect in that moving around it antispin results in extensions in the middle, but moving around it inspin results in antispin petals in the middle.

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 This week I'm going back and revisiting a couple ideas from the past couple months to follow up on them both to show progress and where some of those ideas have taken me. First up is the isolated weave: I've had some progress on this both by practicing standing isolations in all four individual positions of my arms during the course of the weave and with a helpful piece of advice from Charlie on switching from one side of my body to the other. Next, the CAP vs static BTH hybrid poiboi07 and I had chatted about a couple months ago.

techblog69.mp4

After demoing the around the head meltdown last week, I got a comment from one person asking about performing the meltdown as a fountain. While I think that conceptually the two are different enough that a straight-up combination of these moves is not possible, there is a way to perform a similar maneuver by using Alien Jon's concept of body zones. Demoed here are a couple ways to play with this concept. Next up, I'm getting to be relatively happy with my transitions from isolation to lockout, so I'm starting to work through an isolated weave.

techblog67.mp4

I got a request for a tutorial on how to turn with CAPs and found it to be a fun challenge. Here they are approached from the perspective of being fountains in opposite poi motion, wall plane turns that integrate triquetra hybrids, and finally as wheel plane reels--my personal favorite. Enjoy!

tutorialcapsturns.mp4

Definitely a smorgasboard of tricks this week. The first is a repeating triangle pattern done that is repeated at 90 degree angles to reveal what looks to me like a pinwheel, though the trick takes so long to render the idea may be irrelevant for performance. I tried it this past weekend and got a good response, though. I don't know what to call the next trick--I think it ultimately breaks down to halving the triquetra in split-time horizontally. Most of us know the vertical variation, but the horizontal one requires some arm-crossing action.

techblog31.mp4

I think I was mistaken on my categorization of the 1.5 pattern from last week--nonetheless here are some interesting patterns that came from it. Plus: more buzzsaw flower patterns--this time with hands going split-time opposites, more hybrid practice, and patterns with both hands doing trifoil flowers.

techblog13.mp4

The 1.5 pattern in Mireneye's video a few weeks ago gave me a devil of a time and now I think I know why--I think it's a different type of circle-pendulum combo. Here's some theory as to what I think the difference is as well as demonstrating the two in a variety of positions and a couple really odd patterns this experimentation led me to. Plus an update on the hybrid practice technique from last week and I start to play with inversions.

techblog12.mp4