Spherculism : The Online Poi School
History
I have been spinning poi and teaching others to do so since 2000. Towards the end of 2002 I started work on spherculism. The goal was to pull together all the geekiest technical poi spinners around the world and work hard at taking poi to crazy new levels. The first thing to do was to create a web presence. I used phpNuke with a phpbb message board in the early days, mainly because the company I worked for used this system so I had some experience of it.
The original site was a great success. The forum was really active and there was a great deal of teaching and learning going on. During this time our poi skills really took off and we developed many crazy ideas and technique.
The site went through many designs and all was going well. In 2005 I moved to New Zealand and began working on the dvd. Without web access I began neglecting the site and without my constant attention and work the interest in the site decreased. This wasn't so bad since I knew the dvd would be out soon and I could concentrate on the site again.
Graphics and Branding
I've always had great fun with the 'branding' of spherculism. Here's the current site logo:
And here's the 'Sm' graphic, aka 'the Sphercular Om:
The 'blue flame' has been a constant theme for all the graphics. It's an inverted photo of a flame, this is used because the site is not a fire spinning site, we all spin fire from time to time but by dropping the ego ascociated with fire poi we've managed to push the limits way beyond what most fire spinners can do.
Sphercular Vision DVD
The dvd took about a year to produce, for six months it was my only job. The final product is 90 minutes long and contains 20 tracks. The music is mainly by a band called Bad Science from brighton, uk and the video footage is tightly edited to the audio. This was a very big project and I had to learn many new video skills to complete it.
This is the trailer on Youtube:
And here's one of the tracks featuring the amazing Drew and a great tune by Bad Science.
Here are the disc and cover graphics:
Phorum
Once the dvd had been released I teamed up with a good friend and excellent web developer in Vancouver to revamp the spherculism site. We ditched phpNuke, which had become obsolete, and replaced it with a custom content management system. I migrated the phpBB forum over to Phorum 5. I really like phorum, it's very elegantly written and I highly recommend it.
Gallery 2
We wanted the best gallery system on the site, one that could handle images and videos with ease. Gallery 2 is the best solution there is. It is an amazing application.
Poibot
Soon after making the original spherculism site it became apparent that nobody had ever managed to simulate poi moves in a graphical way. There's many good juggling simulators, there's a cool one for diabolo but not one for poi. So I took it upon myself to make the first one, it's called poibot and I used Flash to build it.
After that Poibot became a bit of celebrity and earned its right to become the official mascott. Here's a closer look at the illustration I did for the dvd. I made the 3d modelu sing Z-brush, then painted all the robotic bits in photoshop. The arms at the back are all trced from video footage in the dvd, so it's an amalgamation of all of us using all our different toys.
T-Shirts
Last year I worked on some t-shirt designs for spherculism and firetoys.co.uk, here some of them:
The Dojo
This is a project I'm currently working on. I have made hundreds of poi move videos for the site and there is is tons of great information in the phorum. But we want to create an online tuition system, which uses flash videos, text, images and audio to teach poi. There will be either a subscription cost or a pay per lesson price. We may develop the Dojo using Ruby on Rails or we may make a custom gallery 2 module.