CAP

Vector graphics of poi patterns

As I've played around with my soft and hard transition ideas, I've found it helpful to move around the hand and poi paths of some popular moves in Illustrator and other graphics editing programs, but my technique for doing so has left a lot to be desired. Essentially, I've been putting the proper variables into an online spirograph program (located at http://wordsmith.org/anu/java/spirograph.html and mirrored below), taking a screencapture of the result, and importing it into Illustrator using the livetrace function.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #214: Composites vs CAPs

Last video we rolled through three different approaches to defining CAPs. Here is an alternate approach to breaking down such motions: a couple years ago, Alien Jon introduced me to the idea of spinning composites. Compositing is chaining together increments of poi movement that overlap in hand and poi position to either create repeatable patterns or transition and shift seamlessly between patterns.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #213: What is a CAP?

The question of what constituted a CAP recently came up both in the Tech Poi and Vulcan Tech Gospel groups on Facebook. Here are what I'd consider to be the three main approaches to describing a CAP--in my next video, I'm going to detail a slightly different approach to this question and some of the cool patterns that come not from trying to classify all the CAPs, but from taking the lessons that learning CAPs provide and applying them to more complex types of motion.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #207: CAP to static vs extension transitions

In a follow-up to a video I posted a couple weeks back of playing with triquetra vs pendulum in same time opposites, I realized the transition there that let me hit static vs extension and kind of "unfold" my crossed arms also existed with CAPs if the poi are spinning same time same direction. Here is the transition used both to get from a top-side CAP to bottom and vice-versa.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #201: merging Ronan and G transitions

I forgot to bring my tripod to the studio, so the vid on finding hybrid families using QFT will have to wait for the next video. In the meantime, here's a nifty transition that takes elements from patterns that Ronan and G play with and merges them together in a fun and creative way. It utilizes CAP vs pendulum and lets you switch which hand is performing which move.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #196: Poi head catching patterns

Here's another trick Ronan was showing off on the playa--based in pendulum vs CAP, he was doing a catch with the poi head that would then be used to shift the center of the pattern to either side. Another option was throwing the poi head vertically to enter static vs triquetra. I don't often play with head catching tricks, but these have a really fascinating capacity for shifting an audience's point of attention.

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Drex's Tech Poi Blog #189: Toroid flower inventory and theory

Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.

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Video Tech Blog #163: STSD 8-step hybrid

More STSD hybridy goodness! This time I'm taking the concept of an 8-step CAP with it a little more literally and utilizing the space created by CAP vs BTH static to take the CAP hand around in an 8-step pattern while maintaining the STSD synchronization with the BTH hand.

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Video Tech Blog #147: horizontal stacking patterns based on Leo's breakdown, cont'd

Two more fundamental components of horizontal stacking explored here: the cateye and the point isolation. Neither of these moves is very stable and both require a little big of fudging to line up perfectly with the other poi, but there's still some cool applications for using them both--especially in the last pattern outlined here. Sorry about the uninspired music choice, though...it's nearly 1:30 AM and I just don't feel like digging through my music collection for something else :-P

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Video Tech Blog #146: CAP vs cateye (the arrow)

This will probably wrap up the new tech from the Wesleyan event--this is a move Charlie dropped on Saturday that I thought looked really cool. This is a CAP vs cateye hybrid performed in such a way that each hand performs a single beat simultaneously, such that it takes two cateyes to equal one CAP. Charlie's version is more of a linear extension, which fits well into things like an 8-step CAP or Zan's diamond. Here it is demoed as more of a cateye, which fits well with a split-opposites antispin flower and a nifty transition using split opposites cateyes across the middle.

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