magic show tips – Page 7

Visiting Hocus Pocus!

I started my first long run of the year this week. It’s a 10 day gig in Indio, CA. I flew into Fresno, CA, rented a car and then drove 5 hours to Indio. The nice thing about flying into Fresno is that I got to swing by Hocus Pocus and dig through the boxes of magic there!

I’m also always on the hunt for old Cincinnati stock cards from the US Playing Card Company, and found a ton of them

One of the things I picked up is this shell game set (maker unknown) and it will make a great addition to my three shell game collection!

They had some oddities (mostly gaffs) there and that’s something that I’m into! Here are a couple that are for sale on their website:

While I was there I put a two things for my collection. The first is a “snapping turtle” which is an alligator in a turtle shell:

And the other is what a side show would call a mummified devil or mummified alien.

If you’re ever in Fresno, there’s a ton of magic there (and some oddities!) and it’s totally with the trip!

-Louie

100 Mile Rule

There’s a rule that you’re not supposed to badmouth a gig until you’re one hundred miles away from it. The theory is that once you get 100 miles away, there’s no one connected to the gig that can overhear you say anything bad about it.

On this blog, or social media I try to use a 100 day rule. I try to get 100 days away from a gig before I either complain about it or post something funny/interesting to me, but may not be positive for the event.

That just makes it hard for anyone to backtrack to where you were. This is good if you’re giving non-specific info about the gig. There are plenty of bad gigs that I would return to, if it made sense and I don’t normally want to burn the bridge. Sure there are times when you need to burn it down, but that’s the 1% of bad gigs.

-Louie

How To Show Them What You Do!

Five Simple Steps to Making a Sizzle Reel

Let’s start out with what a sizzle reel is, they are typically a short, fast paced promotional video. In variety entertainment they are usually some between one and three minutes long. The goal is to give a buyer a feel for you and what you do.

Here’s how to make sizzle reel for your show:

Step 1: Go to the movies and watch the trailers for upcoming movies. These are longer than a variety act’s sizzle reel, but they are a good reference for what you are going for. Notice that the movie trailers don’t show whole scenes of the movie. The goal is to give you the vibe of what the movie is about and this is the goal of your sizzle reel, to give the vibe of what your show is.

Step 2: Go through video footage and audio and pick the best clips. I’m assuming you have a bunch of video because you’re regularly recording your show. You should be doing this to work on your show to make your show better. Also, you’ll notice that I mentioned audio, your audio should be recorded separately from your camera. You want clear audio of your voice if you use it in your sizzle reel.

Step 3: Edit out most or all of the set ups to your tricks and just show the magic. An agent explained it to me this way when he said, “I don’t want to see your rope trick, I want to see that you do a rope trick.”

Step 4: Find music that fits the feeling of your show and put your video clips to that music. I use Envato Elements for mine. It’s a subscription service that you get the license to use the music for web purposes. This eliminates any YouTube or whatever copyright claims.

Step 5: Upload it to YouTube or wherever you host your streaming videos. In addition to YouTube I use JWplayer. I pay annually for this service, because there are no ads or suggested videos at the end of your video. This gives you more control over what the potential client sees and you don’t have to worry about YouTube suggesting another act after your video.

One thing I should mention, when you’re compiling the clips, you need to think about the flow and what you want your target audience to think about. For example, I just made a sizzle real for my Incredible Idioms school assembly show, and I want to show the fun vibe of my show, but I also needed to show that there is educational content in the show, it’s not just a magic show.

-Louie

P.S. Here’s the sizzle reel for the Incredible Idioms show:

Doing a Bar Gig

I don’t do a lot of bar gigs anymore, I’m not opposed to them, but they don’t normally make sense with my schedule. Last week I headlined a comedy show at a speakeasy. It was a fun gig!

One of the skills you need for these gigs is to be able to follow any act. The act before me was a comic that was fairly blue, and I do a “TV clean” show, so there’s contrast and the audience has to shift mental gears from his style to mine. There’s nothing wrong with what he was doing, that’s his art. When there’s contrast like that, you need to come onstage with confidence, you’re bringing the audience into your world.

Before the show I always try to do some close up magic, that will have people in the audience already on your side!

The “green room” was in a back corner of the bar and the cool thing was I could watch the show on the TV!

Also I don’t normally have merch to sell at bar gigs, but I took some of my faux children’s books C is for Conspiracy: The ABC’s of Conspiracy Theories and pitched them from the stage.

They sold well after the show, so that was a bonus!!

Bar gigs have a lot of challenges, like sight lines, rowdy crowds, challenging stages, however I find them very rewarding as a performer. Because they are typically smaller venues you can connect with people a lot more than in a larger venue.

-Louie

Sometimes You Gotta Take a Leap of Faith!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about Busker Organs and mine finally showed up…after about a month in transit from Europe! This was a crazy transaction, the guy who made it only takes wire transfer which has no buyer protection and these organs aren’t cheap! I don’t know the guy or have any mutual friends with him, so it was a total leap of faith and I half expected the Busker Organ to never show up.

Well, as of Saturday I have it!

The wooden box it was shipped in was damaged in transit. It looked like it had been dropped, then was dragged across a warehouse! The top and bottom were taped on!

Getting it home to check it out, I got to check out the condition.

Opening the crate, my heart sank when I say most of the pipes were knocked out of place, and it look s like someone tried to put them back (incorrectly). The clips the hold the lid on and the decorative wood pieces on the front were broken off and there were gouges in the wood.

Luckily I had a picture of the organ before it was shipped an was able to use that as a reference to begin to replace the pipes.

While it’s disappointing that the decorative pieces had broken off, it’s a pretty easy fix to glue them back on.

Then I had the task to tuning the organ, and I got to give it a crank!

It worked and sounded great! I just booked a gig for tonight at Magic Mondays in Seattle for an idea I have with it. It’s not magic, but should be fun, and thanks in advance to the Magic Monday’s crew for letting me try this!

-Louie

You Can Say Something Nice!

Recently a booker of a gig send me a screenshot from a magician inquiring about performing at an event that I was already booked at.

This is where the magician who was trying to get a gig could have let it the conversation drop, asked for the gig next year, or talked bad about me, but here’s his reponse:

The guy called me a “legend” and that I was “top rank”. That was really cool of him to do! When everyone is out there being awesome and a good experience for bookers, it’s good for everyone!

-Louie

Four Ace Routine

When I was a teenager I put together a four ace routine that I did all the time. I haven’t really done it in probably a decade, but did it the other day and now it’s creeping into my close up set.

There’s not much to the routine, here’s the flow:

1: Deck is shuffled by the spectator and I cut to the four aces

2: The aces are put in the middle and appear on top of the deck

3: The aces are put into the middle of the deck and the deck is given to the spectator. They shake the deck and the four aces jump out.

It’s a nice little three effect trick with a fun, interactive ending. It’s a good trick to have in my brain to use whenever I need to fill a couple of extra minutes when doing close up magic.

I think you should always have some back up material that you can do with the props you already are carrying. I have my main close up set of material, but I have a ton of things that I can do with a regular deck at a moments notice.

-Louie

It’s the Little Things in Videos

While I was working on my promo video, a video of a magician came across my feed. The trick is fine, but there’s a few things about the video that should have been addressed. Here’s the video:

I’m assuming you noticed the fake audio reaction in the video. They never sound quite right and they way most people use them, they’re never proportional to what they’re doing. It’s always too much.

The other thing you may not have noticed was the guy on the left standing on stage like some sort of body guard. At about the 18 – 20 second mark his face pops into frame. The “audience” is going nuts and he looks bored as hell.

Why is that guy even in the video?

Cropping him out would be a super easy job. As long as you’re in there adding audio tracks, might as well crop him out. It’s the small things that you need to notice in the videos you make. I always try to crop out people who look uninterested or people in the background. It’s not always possible, but you gotta try!

-Louie

New 2024 Promo Video

Way back in about January of 2020 I added a task to my To Do List, and that was to remake my promo video as it was about two years old at that point. It was a low priority item, so I didn’t immediately get to work on it. Then the whole “2020 thing” went down and making a stage magic promo video became super low priority!

Well, four years later I finally got around to making a new promo video for my stage magic show.

This one took me about a 20 + hours to make. Most of that time wasn’t the actual editing, but going through 6 years of video to find the videos that I wanted to pull clips from. It’s pretty easy to know right off the bat if a video is useable based on the background and general video quality. That removes about 60%-70% of videos right way, but it’s still a time consuming process!

The other super time consuming thing is watching the final video over and over again to notice small things, correcting them and then making a new final video. Then repeating that until I’m at final video version 12 or so. There is a point when you just need to be done with the video and barring something crazy you didn’t realize, it’s time to put it out into the world!

I’m glad I finally did it and can remove it from my To Do List!

-Louie

There’s No Plan B For Your A-Game

Awhile ago I was hosting a zoom meeting that was an informal Q & A about performing at senior communities. At one point we were talking about books and I think it was JR Russel who mentioned the book There’s No Plan B For Your A-Game.

One of the concepts in the book is write down a goal and then to work backwards from it identifying the challenges. It’s an interesting take and for me it makes it easier to map out what I need to do to make things happen. For some reason working forwards and identifying milestones is harder for me.

Another thing in the book is the idea of living like you’ve accomplished a goal. It doesn’t mean living beyond your means. It means living with the habits that you would have. It’s important to note that Bo is from the sports world, so working out like you’re in the NFL before you’re there is kinda the idea.

How does that apply to magic?

Simple, do you want to be more creative? What do creative people do? They create, so live like you’re creating every day. Block out 30 mins of creative time and spend that time doing nothing else but creating. Sure, maybe nothing will happen at first, but you’re establishing a habit. Once you have the habit, it’s much easier to sit down and create.

I’m about halfway into the book and I like it!

-Louie