gaff card – MagicShow.Tips

Yesterday I wrote about doing magic trick where a picture of famous art starts blurry, the magically becomes in focus. In the example I used yesterday it was the Mona Lisa, however it just hit me this morning and I’m getting ready to pack for a trip to New Orleans for the Sideshow Hootenanny was that I should make the trick themed to New Orleans.

I remembered that on my first trip to New Orleans that I randomly came across Banksy’s Nola (Rain or Umbrella Girl) on a street corner. Using Nola for the trick makes more sense as it’s local to where I’ll be.

There’s not much to the trick, it’ll simply be a flap card that changes from a blurred image to an in focus image.

A quick Google search shows that the art has been moved to a hotel, so no longer on a street corner. I could do the trick from where the art was…

This is a good example of trying to give a trick some context, more than just check out this ace of hearts that changes to a two of club. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with just having eye candy, but some sort of context is always nice!

-Louie

When I was a teenager there was a trick that came out called Diminishing Returns by Mike Powers. This is a great trick where someone picks a card and the whole deck shrinks except for their card. Then the whole deck grows and their card shrinks. For the finale their card visually grows back to full size. It’s a great action packed trick.

Here’s the video of the Diminishing Returns trick:

It’s a great trick and I did it for quite a while. Recently I was messing around with some cards and ended up playing with a similar gaff and here’s what I came up with:

This is a fun little sequence for the shrinking of a card. There’s not much to it, and I might write it up for Vanish Magazine in the future.