My first attempt at a video compilation with my new GoPro! :) A couple of these are a little hazy because I forgot to clean the lense in between takes and there was a hell of a lot of pollen in the air. Thanks so much to all the folks who let me video them! :)

Music: "The City" by The 1975

Performers:
Jeremy Croxton
Doodle
Drex
Tim Goddard
Hex
Spinnabel
Sticky
Justin Warren & Christina Koller

Fire dancing--hoop, poi, and staff with GoPro!.mp4

Chris Kelly does this really nifty 3-poi trick that I edited into the Top 10 video for this year where he does a CAP going one way and a point iso vs extension going the other way. His version has a CAP in the opposite hand, but I found I could synchronize this trick with a static spin to create some lovely tribrid lines. Demonstrated here in both opposites and same direction.

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A few people have been asking about this move in the online poi forums over the past couple months--Zan shows off a version of it in the Arizona Transmission video, but as of yet I wasn't aware of much other work being done on it in the wider community. Yesterday I managed to get the move down fairly consistently (at the cost of the callouses in between my ring finger and pinkie :-/) and was happy to find that the method I've been teaching to learn Zan's Diamond in my Fundamentals of Tech class totally works for the one-handed version, too.

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This one's been a while in the works: trying to do a polyrhythm hybrid with only one hand! The trick here is to remember which poi is closer at which point in the shape so you can aim it accordingly. Cool looking trick but requires a lot of work and accuracy!

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Man...this video totally started out as something very different indeed ;) I wanted to show off a couple ideas for contact combos I'd been working with, then I wound up with too many of them for a single tech blog...and then Tim Goddard posted his video about tapedeck toroids and it got my creative gears turning. So...here is an interesting hodgepodge of different tech ideas. Enjoy! :)

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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

techblog361.mp4

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

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.

techblog357.mp4

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 :)

techblog355.mp4

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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When I did my tutorial on 3 poi weaves a couple weeks ago, I thought the waistwrap would be switching between thumb led and poi led, but at Wildfire I was shown it's much easier to keep the move in thumb led when making this turn. It feels a little awkward to me, but makes up for it in making the move smoother overall and this effect really comes across in the 360 degree turns you do with it.

techblog351.mp4

A cool poi trick that came out of an experiment from an earlier tech vid: when performing the transition from pendulum vs CAP to static vs point iso, that static vs point iso can serve to transition into either cateye vs iso or cateye vs isolated pendulum. Both have a really cool bouncy effect and make use of something I dearly love about poi: the capacity to create moves that establish relationships between the poi and hands.

techblog349.mp4