Special Techniques with Jon Sawden

DON’T FORGET TO WATCH No. 10 – Paul McPhail performs Juche forwards and backwards

For my 5th degree black belt grading in 1993 I thought it would be a cool idea to perform Juche Tul forwards then backwards for General Choi.

The plan failed miserably as I started the backwards part… I hadn’t even considered the possibility that General Choi would take offence to it. He turned his head and refused to watch. I figured… well… I may as well carry on now and struggled through to the end.

I passed the grading so I guess the General had forgiven me by the day the results were announced.

Here is the footage of the pattern at the grading.

In December 2020 the ITF Hosted an On-line Technical Seminar. We had well over 1000 participants from 60 countries take part.

Here is a bit of behind the scenes background… and some new videos to come out of it.

This course came about due to Covid19. Around the world we were starting to get a backlog of people who wanted to grade for higher degrees but couldn’t, due to the requirement to do an IIC. So originally the idea was to do an on-line IIC.

After some discussion it was decided by the Technical Committee and the ITF Board to do a qualifying course for gradings… but it would be different from an IIC (obviously), so wouldn’t be called one.

The plan was for each of the technical committee members to create videos of our subject matter, and use those videos in conjunction with live Q&As. So we all set about doing that – only to find on our first practice that the videos would be too unreliable to use. Depending on the connection, they could be shaky and with bad audio.

So two weeks out, and already 800 registrations, we had to change our plan.

So we each then had to find people to work with, either in person or remotely, to demonstrate the patterns and do corrections with them. Master Judet and GM Lan were able to do that in person, but the rest of us had to work with people in remote locations.

In a way it worked out well as our sessions took on a different feel as we brought in some of the best pattern performers from around the world. I got to work with some world champions from Argentina and it was nice to meet and practice with them on-line.

Leading up to the seminar I have to tell you we were nervous. How would Zoom cope with 1000 participants… and how would we? With the help of the chairman of the Communications Committee we practiced being able to find the people in Zoom, Spotlighting them to full screen and so on. I also used some slides to try and make the most of what Zoom can do.

In the end we were happy with the way it all went. Everyone was so positive and we hardly had anyone drop off over the four hour sessions each day.

So some of the videos I prepared that didn’t end up being used, so I have uploading those for Members to watch.

This videos ended up being quite different from the Live version so should be of value even if you were at the seminar.