magic tricks – Page 4 – MagicShow.Tips

The Elephant in the Room…

One of my best friends (who is also an amazing performer) always says, “you’ve got to address the elephant in the room”. What he means is if there is something that the whole audience can see or is aware of that’s a distraction, you need to acknowledge it. When I perform at fairs, sometimes the “elephant in the room” is a literal elephant, other times it’s not.

A few weeks ago the backdrop to my stage was a row of porta-potty’s. It’s something that I needed to address, so here’s how I did it:

By addressing it immediately in the show, I got a big laugh. It also shows a bit of my personality, it shows that I’m fun and don’t take myself too seriously.

I talk a little bit about this in my interview with John Abrams on his podcast The Variety Artist that comes out on August 12th. I talk about a stage I performed on where to get onto the stage people from the audience physically had to leave the building and go around back. I also talk about how I addressed this problem. If you don’t listen to the podcast, you should give it a listen!

How To Create New Tricks…

It drives me nuts when people say they “aren’t creative like me” or that ” not everyone can create new tricks”. That’s total BS, it’s not that they aren’t creative, it’s that they aren’t motivated to be creative. Just like learning a sleight of hand move it simply takes practice.

The easiest way to start your creative thinking is to read a description of a magic trick and figure out a method. Don’t watch a demo video as what you see can affect what you do. Watching a demo could make try to make you recreate that specific the method, this isn’t what you want to do.

Coming up with your own methods is a good starting point for learning to be creative.

The key to being creative is actually putting energy into it. Sure some ideas pop out of nowhere, some are the result of specific work. I used to set aside 30-45 mins every morning to try to come up with ideas (magic tricks / jokes / etc). The key is to do it everyday, I do it in the morning because if I do it then, it will get done. Be aware that 95% of these ideas will be junk, but you are mining for the 5% that’s good.

Make Them Come To You…

This week I’m doing a lot of local gigs and it’s nice to be home. In the summer I do many summer day camps for kids. Usually I’m doing them for school age kids, but this week I’ve been doing mostly younger kids in the 3-5 age range. This is a smidge younger than my demographic, however the shows are doing fine.

One thing that I consciously don’t do in my show is any standard kids show material. No break away wands or anything like that. I want do make them come up a level. This isn’t something that’s easy to do. Making the wand break is easy, making counting pieces of string entertaining to a kid is hard. I’m purposely taking a harder route, but in doing that it makes me a better performer.

Challenging the kids to be more sophisticated separates me from most other kid shows. It also teaches the kids to be better audiences, and that listening is an important part of watching a show, and more important than screaming. Many kid shows are simply getting the kids amped up, and that’s it. They have one gear. I have some slower parts to the show, and some more high energy parts. Having texture in your show is important, even when performing for kids.

Pump The Breaks…

At my only show I did yesterday I really slowed down. The entire show I probably went 30% slower. I let the magic moments sink in and the jokes marinade with the audience. I’m really happy with the results and I’m going to keep the slowness going for all three shows I’m doing today.

I understand why I go fast. It’s a fear of failure. It’s the fear of audiences not liking the tricks, or jokes not landing with the audience. How I deal with it is that I plow on to the next line. I recently watched a short little animated documentary on Doc Ellis. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the Major League Baseball pitcher that pitched a no hitter on LSD!

What doc was doing with drugs and alcohol was dealing with his fear of failure as a major league pitcher. I’m doing the same thing with speed. Moving from bit to bit and not giving them time to fail, but in the process they aren’t getting time to succeed!

Breaking In Tricks…..

Before my show at a library I did some tricks that I’m working on as my preshow. One of the tricks is a dollar production called Sketch Money by Joao Miranda. It’s a drawing of a dollar bill that turns into a real dollar bill and other I did was the gypsy thread. Sketch Money … Continue reading “Breaking In Tricks…..”

Before my show at a library I did some tricks that I’m working on as my preshow. One of the tricks is a dollar production called Sketch Money by Joao Miranda. It’s a drawing of a dollar bill that turns into a real dollar bill and other I did was the gypsy thread.

Sketch Money played better than I thought it would, and I added a switch at the end to get rid of the gimmicked dollar bill. Basically I’m going an “under the box” type switch with the pad of paper instead of a box. It worked well, and I thought there’d be a ton of heat after the dollar production, but there was none. That was very unexpected.

The Gypsy Thread trick from a technical end is fine, I just need to work on selling the end. The trick is missing the magic moment. I think I need to verbally tell them what’s going to happen right before it does happen. I’m doing this trick for kids, and I think the moment of licking the string overshadows the restoration. The string licking is a very funny moment for the kids. I need some more separation between it and the restoration, and to give the restoration a magic moment, like a snap.

I’m happy with how these tricks are coming along and both are for my summer library shows, so hopefully they’ll be solid tricks by the end of the season.

Take a Risk…

Sometimes you have to do something that’s hard. Where if it fails, you stand to actually lose. I was curious about adding money to the presentation of the 10 card poker deal. The idea of losing real money, even for a sure fire bet was hard to do the first time.

Yesterday I put some money out, by the third hand I had over $400 on the line. Personally I don’t like the idea of me giving the person money to bet with. I prefer just betting my money, and letting them risk nothing. I think that if they never had money in their hand, the feeling of loss is lessened.

The main reason I wanted to put real money on the line, is that I wasn’t positive I wanted to have a money aspect of the routine. What I learned was that I don’t, but I never would have known, had there not been a risk element to it.

Real vs. Manufactured Moments

One of the reasons live entertainment is unique is that anything can happen and each show has the potential to be unique. The problem comes in when you have performers who refuse to go off track, and strictly stick to the script. When you ignore things that come up and don’t, “live in the moment” … Continue reading “Real vs. Manufactured Moments”

One of the reasons live entertainment is unique is that anything can happen and each show has the potential to be unique. The problem comes in when you have performers who refuse to go off track, and strictly stick to the script. When you ignore things that come up and don’t, “live in the moment” you are missing out on a gold mine of stuff that can happen.

One of the things in my show is I have places where the person onstage can have a real moment onstage with me, not a manufactured one. Then I get to play, we can see where it goes. Sometimes it doesn’t go anywhere and that’s the risk, however the reward outweighs the risk.

The only hard part is to recognize when real moment becomes a manufactured moment. This is something that will happen with time. You’ll learn that if you ask a specific question within a certain contex you’ll typically get a handful of answers. Over time you’ll end up with a response to those. That’s when the real moment becomes a manufactured moment. There’s nothing wrong with a manufactured moment. I have a ton of them in my show.

Next time you perform, ask a question and play with the answer you’re given.

Use Everything…

Most magicians have drawers full of magic that they don’t use. Stuff they’ve bought and for whatever reason ends up in a drawer never to be seen again. I used to have that, however a couple years ago I decided I was going to actually use all of my props…at least a few times.

I’ll do the tricks from the “magic junk drawer” at about a dozen times. The goal is to learn what I can from the prop before throwing it away. Occasionally I’ve been surprised and something that I thought was junk became a keeper.

I think the reason a lot of good tricks end up in drawer is because the price to prop ratio is bad. What I mean by that is if you paid $50 and they gave you a blank card your mindset is that it was a rip off. The trick’s value when performed could be much higher!

However the majority of the tricks are simply bad tricks that someone either loved enough to sell…or was greedy enough to sell a bad idea. Bottom line is that if it doesn’t work for you after you’ve done it about ten times, don’t keep it!

Magic Books…

TI’m a magic book guy, I love magic books. My generation of magic is at the tail end of books, when I was getting serious about magic videos didn’t really exist. The VHS tapes that were around were insanely expensive at $75-$100 bucks!

Being a book guy, that means you find a lot of hidden little gems of magic. Things that are cool and buried in a book. Someone once told me that the best things in books are the tricks with no illustrations. They are the things that the author wants in print to assert ownership, but doesn’t want anyone to do.

My book collection is pretty big and I like having a large selection of books to reference, or to read. I’ve also worked through most of the stuff in all of the books I own. Many years ago, Eugene Burger mentioned in an article in a magic magazine that he only had a few magic books. He loved books, read them, however he didn’t keep them. He gave them away after reading them.

I thought it was strange that he didn’t keep books. As I get older, and my performing style is more defined, the books that want to keep are probably less than a couple dozen. Most of these books would be books that had an influence on my, now that I really need to read them again.

This has made me think about the advice that you should “Only learn seven tricks”. This is advice that I don’t agree with. You can’t pick seven trick without learning hundreds of tricks to pick those seven. We no longer live in a time where you can make a career out of a handful of tricks. You need to keep learning and adding to your base knowledge to grow!

TLDR: Keep learning, but you don’t need to be a hoarder!