Video – Page 47 – MagicShow.Tips

Vanishing Bird Cage…

Every now and then there are tricks that you can’t get out of your head. One of them for me is the Vanishing Bird Cage. I’ve revisited it several times over the years, and in the past hit stumbling blocks with it. The birdcage is probably one of the most difficult tricks I’ve worked on. There so much you need to overcome, it’s not as simple as the old magic catalog ad makes it seem.

One of the issues that’s easy to overcome is the issue of doing the birdcage later in your show. This was solved by Billy McComb with the use of a Take Up Reel. It was popularized by Tommy Wonder in Volume 2 of the Books of Wonder. By popularized, I mean people became aware of it. After that book came out, there were still not many people used one, simply because of price and availability. If you could find one or get someone to make you one they’d cost you somewhere in the ballpark of $1,000 or more!

One day I was driving and an idea hit me for a way to produce the second lock of a Take Up Reel on my 3d Printer, I pulled over and drew it on the back of an envelope. After using it and having some other people use it and gotten their feedback, I’ve finally decided to offer them to other magicians.

Here’s the promo:

When something’s in your head, if you keep chipping away at it, eventually you’ll come up with a solution!

Click here for more info on my Take Up Reel or order one!

Best Card Gaff!

One of the coolest card gaffs is the Modern Flap Cards by Hondo. He makes the as a premade gaff, or as a video where you can learn to make your own. The video is the way to go, as you’ll be a lot more versatile with what you can do. There’s a little bit of a learning curve to making them, but it’s really not that hard.

I use one in my preshow video in my cruise ship show, and in a lot of social media videos. I haven’t used them in a live show, simply because I don’t really have a place for them. The problem is a playing card is small, and the change is hard to view from the back row.

It hit me a while ago that you can do the change with the card isolated in a cup. I hadn’t had time to really play with it before the self quarantine, however I played around with it and here’s the card color change change in a cup:

There’s a little bit of knack to do the move in a cup. In a nutshell I’m using the weight of the card to keep the change from happening. It’s all about the angle you lean the card at. I think the next time I make some of the flap cards, I’m going to have a bit less tension, so that I have more wiggle room with the angle of the lean.

The discovery of doing the change in a cup is the direct result of playing with the gimmick and a good example of why you should be playing with gimmicks beyond what’s in the instructions.

Creative Cup Productions…

Tricks that end with something big appearing are always fun to do. They are (usually) amazing and the big object is an instant applause cue and signal that it’s the end of the trick. The challenge right now with all magic happening over cameras, is how do you load the object?

A couple of nights ago I decided I wanted to do a Cups and Balls type trick where someone couldn’t backtrack on video and figure out where the load came from. First I had to examine how to get the big object under the cup.

There are essentially three ways.

First you can take the object off screen for a second and load the item. This works for a video conference where they can’t rewatch the video of the trick later. Personally I think that magic that’s put out on video should be able to withstand at least one rewatching of the video.

The next way is you can load the large item like you would in a normal show. Unfortunately misdirection on a screen doesn’t work like in real life and while it still may play most of these style of loads will be less deceptive. I’m not saying all will, for example a load coming from under the table while you are sitting will be more deceptive that one coming from the back pocket while you are standing.

The final way is having the item in video’s frame and hidden, and sneaking it into the cup. The Larry Jennings / Ron Wilson Chop cup routine is a good example where the ball is stolen from inside a bag.

I decided to go with the having the item already in the frame as this is the method that would withstand the repeated viewings. That got me thinking about the Scotty York Cups and Balls routine where the cups start the routine loaded with the large balls. I then took the frame work of my Cee-Lo (cup and dice) routine and started playing with the cup loaded from the beginning.

Here’s what I came up with:

My daughter invented part of this trick a couple of years ago.She makes me pay a licensing fee to perform the trick!…..#magic #magictrick #cupsandballs #sleightofhand #dicetrick #nocameratricks #magician
Posted by Louie Foxx- Magic and comedy on Tuesday, April 7, 2020

To do this trick, you’ll notice I’m not using the chop cup as it’s traditionally used. Normally people use the cup to help make the ball vanish and reappear. In this routine, I’m using it as a delivery system for dice. I came up with a way for it to give me two separate loads of dice. Once at a about the 43 second mark and then at about the 52 second mark for the large die. Making a “progressive loading” cup took a bit more work than just shoving dice into a cup with my hand, but I think it’s more deceptive on video.

Ideally since I’m only loading one die, I’d like to use a larger die as the final production. Due to the self quarantine, I’m limited to what I’ve got at home.

Right now as most of us shift from live performing to virtual performing, we really should be reexamining methods to see if there’s a better way to do things.

My Cooking Show…

In yesterdays post I showed a gimmick that I was making for a video. This video was made because my brother said I should do a cooking show for our weekly “virtual dinners”. A night before our dinner, I had a ton of ideas and wrote out a rough script, and sent it to a buddy of mine who punched it up. I then built the gimmicks and recorded the show.

Here’s what I made:

At about the 9 min mark you can see the gimmick I posted about yesterday. There’s a couple of other interesting magic effects that happen in the video as well. This was what I found interesting about making the whole video was that the cooking was a frame for magic to happen. It was a built in presentation hook.

It took over 12 hours to make this video, and the sole goal of it was to make my brothers laugh. That’s art, money or longevity of it wasn’t a consideration, it was simply to get a reaction. What reaction are the videos your are posting designed to get?

Take It Further…

If you’ve seen my magic lecture you’ve heard my favorite quote, which is essentially what my lecture is about. If you haven’t, here’s the quote:

Go past crowd pleasing and into real comedy…
Mel Brooks

He says it on Tom Papa’s podcast, it’s a great interview and you should listen to it. In my lecture I use the quote not just for comedy, but for magic. Sponge balls are crowd pleasing, how do you go past that and get into real magic?

Let’s get back to what I’m writing this post about. Someone in a magic forum had posted a picture of the nest of wands comedy prop that was broken.

If you’re not familiar with the Nesting Wands trick you have large diameter wand and smaller wands keep coming out of it. If you’re not familiar with the prop, here’s it in action:

The sets that are common in the USA have one end that’s sealed, and the person who wrote the Facebook post thought that they were broken and need to be fixed. For me whenever a prop breaks, I look at it as a chance to p lay with the prop and figure out things that may not have been possible before. I’ve had a bunch of cool things come out of props breaking and getting a new view of them.

When I was younger and did magic shows at kids birthday parties, I used this prop. However the set I had were made by Tops Magic in Europe. Most people in the USA didn’t like this set of Nesting Wands because they were open at both ends. I loved them because there was a lot more you could do with them. Here’s some ideas:

When the kid tries to “one up you” and restack them, they will fall out the other end.
You renest them and they all fall onto the floor.
You renest them and they slide out the other end and land in your case, but you don’t notice that. Then once they are all in your case, you look at the wand in your hand and see it’s empty. You then look around for where they went.
When the kid hands them back to you, you drop them all over the floor. You pick up the biggest wand and ask the kid to hand you another wand. They do, you put it into the wand in your hand and it just falls out the bottom ( you don’t notice that) and have the kid keep handing you wands and they keep falling through. Repeat till it’s not funny and at that point start holding the wands in with your finger at the bottom. Once they are all nested, let them drop out and onto the floor!

Look a prop breaking as an opportunity to do something creative and new with the prop. Sometimes you’ll just have a broken prop…other times you’ll have gold!

In Love With a Method…

One of the worst reasons to keep trying to do a trick is because you are in love with the method. I’ve got a trick in my show that I love the method more than the audience loves the trick. I think the trick has something going for it, it’s just a matter of figuring out what that is.

The reason that I’m still trying to make Silk Thru Coathanger work:

I’ve written about this trick a lot on this blog, and it’s still a work in progress. If I was rating my routine for it, I’d give it the grade of C. However a while ago I added a move, took out a move and rearranged the sequence. Those changes moved it up from a D to a C. I’d be really happy if I could get it up to a B.

Recently I did some workshopped it with some other performers and we came up with some ideas for how to frame it. We’ll see how those play…

Catch your whale

Right now we’ve all found ourselves with a lot of extra time. I’ve been using mine to try to catch my “Great White Whale” of tricks I’ve always wanted to create. This trick has been in my head for over a decade and a lot of things had to come together to for it to happen.

Here’s the trick, and be sure to watch the whole thing:

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of using a nested replicas of the main prop as a final load ever since I read Gary Oullett’s cups and balls routine in his Fulminations column in Genii magazine. Then about 10 or 15 years ago I thought about applying it to the shell game. The hurdle was getting shells to nest and enough of them.

Then the breakthrough came when I got a 3D printer. I could print the shells, however the problem was they didn’t look like shells. They looked like plastic things that kinda looked like walnut shells. A friend of mine sent me a link of how to make molds and I tried to learn off of youtube videos with limited success. I ended up taking a 4 hour class on making molds and resin casting that really helped speed up the learning curve.

I kept making baby steps to get towards the end result and finally got there. I’m not done yet, ideally in the future I’ll have some shells that look a little bit better, but for now I have a workable version of the trick!

Fix It!!!

When someone puts out a magic trick, there are two ways the creator does it. One is how they do it and the other is a dumbed down version for people who don’t want to practice. Personally when I put out a product, I put out what I actually do and use (at the time of putting it out). That way it’s a release that I know inside and out.

A great trick that came out a few years ago, but has mixed reviews is called Split.

The effect is you have a twenty dollar bill and it visually rips into two ten dollar bills. This is a great trick, but the main complaint I saw was the gimmick was obvious. The problem that people weren’t able to see past was that it was designed to be done with non-US currency. The money in other countries is more colorful and the designs hide the gimmick better.

For me it took about a minute of looking at the gimmick to solve the problem. Here’s my gimmick:

Basically I moved the gimmick from the middle of the bill to the edges. There’s a lot more printing to hide it on a US bill.

Then there was a corner of the old bill that was slightly visible when I was doing mirror practice. I covered it with the corner of a bill that matched what it should be. This was a small thing that really wasn’t an issue, it just sorta bugged me.

When you get a trick and you think it doesn’t work, before you write a bad review, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Was the trick designed with European money, or created by someone that’s left handed, or whatever. You many not work exactly as the creator, and you need to be able to adjust.