Hi everyone, how are you doing?

Above is my new video, Work In Progress 9, my ninth video in my series of Work In Progress videos.

The general idea of these videos is to track my progress in juggling, starting with WIP 1, made all the way back in June 2008. The videos are generally only of 3 balls, however there have been deviations from this theme, in the videos WIP 2 and WIP 3.

I try my best to fill these with new and fresh tricks that I haven’t filmed before. I may include the same tricks if I made significant progress in my performance of them, which sort of excuses me filming reversed mills mess like 5 times.

I’d like to think that this is some of the better stuff within 3 balls. I stick to front of the body technical tricks, so no backcrosses, no footcatches or balancing. It’s not that they’re not good tricks, it’s just that I don’t personally like them.

A lot of this stuff doesn’t have names, there are too many variations out there for someone to coin every single one, after a while, you just start describing the pattern with its components.

0:12 to 0:22 is my 441 variation, which has some weird “1″ one throws

0:25 to 0:38 is my box variation. It’s basically box, with a 1 up 2 up component slapped onto the end, finished off with a fake underarm pass, siteswap “2″. The first one is where I throw the outer ball higher, so as to make that beat of gap for me to make the pass. This is less interesting as the lower ball of the 2 up part ends up as a hop that can be neglected. The second variation is where I throw the 2 up with the inside ball higher. This again gives me time to make the pass, however this time the pattern is a bit more definitive. Of course “inside” and “outside” is subjective, because the first one, I throw the higher ball of the 2 up on the same side as the “4″ of my box so I call it the outside version and vice versa.

0:39 to 1:05 are some of the slam variations I can do, which ends rather abruptly because of a collision. The stuff here is pretty standard, mixing it up makes it more interesting. The stuff includes slams, reverse slams, over the top slams, reverse over the top slams, N box, underarm “1″, and an N box stall, caught as a fork and then butterflied back into position. I saw most of this stuff from Reuben’s “3 ball new inventions” video, and some more from his latest video. The stall for example was his idea (0:59 to 1:02) except I added the fork part because in WIP 8, I thought I couldn’t do the normal stall very well.

1:07 to 1:25 is my claw section. In here, I combined some cherrypicker, waterfall, reverse waterfall, clawed windmill, reverse called windmill and clawed half mess. The trick here is to keep changing between the tricks because the only pattern particularly interesting by itself here is reverse waterfall.

1:26 to 1:42 is a lil’ play thing I put in for the fun of it. Nothing particularly cool happened here, I put it because it resembled the previous part, but not clawed. I basically varied boston mess, windmill, reverse windmill and 7131 to come up with a small routine. 

The interesting part about this section is at the end, where I did a weird little collect thing. It wasn’t intentional, I finished up on 7131, but I think an extra shuffle went in it, and it make for an interesting effect. Sort of.

1:43 to 1:48 was the fast box swap, which I stole again from Reuben. It’s basically the fake box pass pattern, but made faster by doing a swap every beat. This changes the pattern a bit, and I can’t really describe it, if you feel comfortable with the prior pattern, you can probably emulate this one just by trying. It’s a lot harder though, I struggled for a while to get a reasonable run on video (which was only 5 seconds).

1:51 to 2:20 is my section of Rubenstein’s. Rubenstein’s revenge had a lot of hidden variations in it. First of all, you can control the U ball to stay on whichever side. You can also add in a shower throw, much like how you can have mills mess shower. In WIP 7, I showed me doing Rubenstein’s with manipulation of U ball and the addition of 7131 to it.

This time, I had the addition of 7131 to get me started, which then moved onto the addition of “42″ into the pattern with the 2 caught as an underarm catch. I then did the pattern with the addition of an underarm shower throw, and finally with an underarm 7131 pattern put into the middle.

2:24 to 2:48 was my tribute to Will Penman’s hurricane series. I can’t remember the names but the idea is that they’re named after hurricanes, from the letter A to W. All three of the tricks here was in that series of tricks. There’s more to them than what you’d imagine from first inspection. I thought they’d be simple “423″ variations, but they were more complicated, and took quite a while for me to get the idea of them. The first one, as you can probably see isn’t particularly well performed either, as it’s sort of hard. Bravo to Will for creating them.

Well there’s the run down of my newest WIP, WIP 9. This is one of my shorter videos, I’d hate to have to list out everything in WIP 8 or 7 which were much longer. Maybe I will though…

- Jason