Juggling project · 50 hours
Relearning the inverted box, one recorded hour at a time
The inverted box is a 3-ball trick I could do once. I'm getting it back with 50 hours of on-camera practice, and every session gets measured and turned into a short coaching video. Come watch the counter climb (and the balls drop).
The 50-ball progress bar
One ball per hour. They fill up as practice video piles up.
Latest coaching video
Session log
Sessions of 15+ minutes count toward the 50 hours (raw video time, rests included). Shorter ones are warm-ups: still on the record, just not on the counter.
What is the inverted box?
Three balls, two hands, both hands throwing at the same time. One ball goes straight up a column on the left, another straight up a column on the right, and the third shuttles side to side underneath them in a low U, like the bottom of a box that someone turned upside down.
In juggler notation (siteswap) it is (4,2x)(2x,4): each beat one hand sends a ball up its own column (the 4) while the other passes a ball straight across (the 2x). Then they swap jobs. It looks calm. It is not calm.
It is also called the upside-down box.
How this works
- I say “start juggling” and the webcam starts recording. No fiddling with buttons mid-pattern.
- A ball tracker runs over the footage and measures what a coach would eyeball: column width, throw height of each hand, pass clearance under the columns, and sync between the hands.
- The pipeline cuts a coaching video under 3 minutes: best and worst moments, the numbers, and a couple of concrete fixes for next time.
- Sessions of 15+ minutes add their raw video time to the counter above. Then I pick the balls up off the floor and do it again.
Previously, on Graham juggles
This isn't my first long-form juggling project. Years ago I filmed a 10-hour series and put it on a YouTube channel. YouTube later deleted the channel, so those ten hours now live on only in my forearms and in a couple of friends' memories (who are, frankly, unreliable witnesses).
They don't count toward the 50. The balls don't remember them either. This time the footage lives on my own site, so the only thing that can delete it is me tripping over a power cord.