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

techblog359.mp4

Taking a thread from last week's video that included some fun uses of point isolations, here are a few that utilize the split-opposites timing and include either horizontal cateyes or pendulum vs CAP.

techblog301.mp4

These are just a few fun pendulum-based moves I was working with over the weekend, including two based on patterns learned from Ronan at the Tahoe Flow Festival in September.

techblog299.mp4

Following up on last week's video of the pentagram inversion, here's a similar move that's Zan's Diamond as a toroid and a couple fun combos that can be used with it. Plus which I'm playing around a bit with my format--tell me what you think!

techblog298.mp4

It took me a very long time to learn airwraps--the usual wisdom, that when you wrap up a pair poi and they automatically unwrap never really worked for me. Even more confusing to me was how some folks could wrap their poi both ways. I'd tried doing it in an introverted kind of place and had an epically hard time of it.

techblog297.mp4

This was a nifty idea hatched over the weekend: toroid pentagrams and inversions tend to be moves with the same number of beats, so can they be mashed up together? The answer apparently is yes! This took a whole lot of practice and doing to make a reality, but the result is a pentagram being used as one side of a series of inversions--a great mashup of at least three different techniques I've played with on my tech blog in the past few months.

techblog296.mp4

Following up on some of the threads from #293, here's a few weave-based moves switched into an atomic context with vertical vs horizontal planes. Funny thing: the inversion in atomics utilizes a tangle arrangement whereas these weaves utilize an atom arrangement--in other words, they possess opposite polarities, to borrow a term from Tracy Wilhelm.

techblog295.mp4

Any time two planes overlap (read: are not parallel), they overlap in one of four different ways: cranes, butterflies, atoms, or tangles. In the first three arrangements, it's possible to keep the poi rotating without interfering with each other. I'm pretty sure that any and all tangles result from the final atom shape. Here's a handy-dandy diagram that breaks this down in an easy-to-read fashion: http://www.drexfactor.com/sites/default/files/atomicclashes.jpg

techblog294.mp4

After learning both the split opposites and split same direction inversions, it dawned on me that a body could think of these as being different projections of a split-L 3D shape. If this is the case, one could open up into a horizontal versus vertical atomic shape and produce the shape in this video above--there are many more a-coming! :)

techblog293.mp4

This is a meteor-inspired move from the glowsticking community. Marvin Ong was the first to show it to me and both Kate McCoy and Noel Yee have done some cool expansions on this idea. I'd had a rough time learning how to do it because my one-handed poi isn't terribly good, but I'd come up with at least one trick that had made it easier. Here's how I made it work for myself.

techblog292.mp4