Tag: media spot

Doing a National News Spot!

A few days ago, I was doing a news spot to promote the state fair that I’m performing at. In this contract, I’m only doing my Vintage Organ, so no magic. One of the things that I did was go over what I planned to do with the person I’d be talking to on the show. He asked if he could play the organ and I said “yes”, then asked him if he wanted to just play a song or if he wanted to get a laugh. He said, “laugh”, so that’s what we went with. I’ll post a video of the media spot when I get it.

When you do TV, there’s a lot of waiting around. My call time was 8am, and we didn’t do the actual spot until 9:45am! One of the things that I did was start to play Name That Tune with songs on my organ. I did this about 10 mins before we were supposed to start. I didn’t want to force it in; I noticed everyone was standing around doing nothing. I asked how much time we had and was told about 10 mins, so I started the game.

Here’s the “behind the scenes” video that Fox and Friends posted:

Not only did this kill some time, but since I had been waiting for close to two hours, I wanted to do something to put some energy back into me! It worked well, and it was a fun news spot!

Last year I made a behind the scenes video of a news spot that you can watch here!

These news spots can be intimidating, especially national ones like this, but a little bit of planning and a little bit of goofing around make a huge difference!

-Louie

Media Spots and Magic

Not all media spots are rockstar spots. Here’s one that I did, and it was fine:

I should have cut out the multiple force and maybe just started with the card selected. I was very rushed for the trick, and while I think it played OK, it would have been better if I did it slower.

One thing I did do before we started was that I told the reporter that I was going to ask them to draw something on a card. I wanted them to think of something simple to draw so we didn’t waste time for them thinking of a card.

If you’ve never done a live, on location TV spot, they can be very challenging. You get a general idea of how much time you have, but that can quickly change and change during the media spot while you’re performing and you have no idea. Before live media spots, I always try to come up with a signal for the reporter to give me when I need to wrap it up. There’s usually a producer talking in their ear telling them how much time we have or don’t have left.

These live spots are fun, but also very challenging!

-Louie

News Spot

Here’s a news spot I did earlier this week:

It’s an OK media spot, not the best. They wanted 90 seconds, and I ran the card trick for the camera guy and producer and they wanted the whole routine, just done in 90-120 seconds. That made the spot rushed, I should have let most of the effects linger longer for displays of the card.

Then the camera work during the card trick missed a lot of things because it was tightening up when it should have been wider. All in all, it wasn’t a bad TV spot, but it wasn’t great.

-Louie