About The Firechains Site |
September 2006: I started writing this site around July/August of 1999 when I was living and working in Perth, Australia because of the frequent feelings of 'lack-of-new-move-frustration' I'd experienced over the previous couple of years. I was first introduced to firechains when I was backpacking around Asia, and I so often went for ages before meeting someone who could suddenly fire my inspiration and set me off on another learning rush. Like a friend says, the best inspiration for a mind is another mind. The impetus for the site came from the fact that, back then, there was virtually nothing on the web to help folk who were on their own learn poi and to allow them to exchange their ideas. Around the time that the fledging version of this site went on the web, a couple of other sites were getting established - most notable at the time were the new Home of Poi site (with ten video clips then - just look at it now!), the darkly-beautiful-in-it's-infancy Incendium site and the Floating in Quiddity juggling and poi site. I'm happily amazed, and grateful too, for the growth and proliferation of sites since then and the sheer volume of knowledge that has been passed around by other folk who took the time to share their experiences. The code for the site itself was written on the run using borrowed computers as I mooched from Oz through Asia and back to Europe in the autumn of '99. Pretty much any machine that I could lay my sticky fingers on was used, from free library access to forgotten old bangers running Notepad on Windows 3.1, so that I could post as much useful stuff as I knew on the web. I'm still idly dreaming of getting a machine which probably goes some way towards explaining why I'm so abysmally slack at updating the site. A chance encounter with an artist's doll and a couple of months with unrestricted computer access (and too much time on my hands) led to the blossoming of the move breakdowns that are on the site now. Initially, I thought for a while about photographing this little bendy doll in various positions, but the cost of developing a couple of hundred frames and the fact that the doll's shoulder joints just weren't quite as flexible as they needed to be for poi led to the abandoning of that idea. Using only what I could find in my rucksack and a non-existent budget, I opted for the free and time-consuming method of drawing each image. Many mornings were spent sketching and repositioning the wooden doll so I could get an idea of how a human body looked as the arms moved around in various patterns. After much drawing, erasing, inking, scanning and pixel counting, the finished product was born. Next time, a video camera for sure. Hope the site was of use, and ta for stopping by.
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