magic show tips – Page 138

Removing The Force…

I finally got around making a trick that’s been on the back burner for a couple of months. I really like the trick 52 B Wave 2.0 by Vernet. This is essentially a brainwave deck with the kicker of all the cards being blank at the end. It’s got a great three beat ending.

There’s one thing that I don’t like about it. What I think is the weakness is that you have to force a color (red or black), which isn’t a huge deal. I do see how adding a second bank of reveal cards would bump up the price and possibly make working it a little more complex.

I decided make it so that I could do the trick and have any card named. I went out and bought some matte finish spray to make some rough cards. It was a pretty easy process to make the black deck, the one surprise I had was the Vernet jumbo cards are a tiny bit shorter than the Bicycle Jumbo Cards, so I had to trim down my reveal cards. Other than that, it was pretty painless.

The routine I’m doing has people throwing cards, and before I had to force half of the card initially, then after that it was a free choice. Now I don’t need to do the initial force, just toss the pack to the audience and they start tossing away cards. It should be much cleaner this way.

Four Cages…

When I was at the Abbott’s Magic Get Together a couple of months ago, on the way home in Minneapolis, I added four new vanishing birdcages to the collection. Two were the older rigid styles and two were the more modern semi rigid style cages.

We’ll start with talking about the most modern cage of the bunch. It’s one of the semi rigid cages made in the style of the Milson Worth Silver Meteor vanishing cage.

I think the Indian design is slightly better than the original as the bars don’t stick out as far as on the Milson Worth cage. The problem with the Indian cage is that whatever metal it’s made from is very heavy when compared to the original Milson Worth cage. When you vanish it, it drops like a ton of bricks!

Now let’s look at the two rigid cages:

Both of these cages are made is similar styles and both have the “spoon” broken off of the front right corner. The spoon tries to eliminate some snags on the sleeve as the cage goes up your sleeve.

The cage on the left is polished metal and the has a little bit more care taken in putting in the bars. It also weighs a ton!

The cage on the right isn’t polished and is slightly bigger, but was made of lighter metal.

Honestly, I can’t imagine using this style of cage compare to the modern semi rigid lindhurst style vanishing cages. They are very heavy, and don’t collapse well.

Now let’s chat about the final cage, which is the linhurst style cage.

This is the same style of cage that I’ve been using for a while. The only difference is that this cage has all of it’s bars! It also has some loops added to hang the bird on. I think these loops were added by whoever bought the cage, and not the manufacturer (but I could be wrong)

This cage is virtually the same dimensions as an Owen’s Challenge Cage and it has a great collapsing action. This cage is going to be my main working cage from here on! I totally lucked out on finding it and the price it was sold to me for.

22 Days of Getting Better…

A couple of days ago I finished up my run at a 22 day gig (that took place over 30 days). I’m reflecting on all of the work I got done on the show over the 66 shows I did. Every show I was working on something. Sometimes it was a full routine, and sometimes it was small, like adding some confetti to a bit in the that I do with a kid.

For me, it’s all about trying to get better every show. Yes, there are some shows where you shouldn’t be trying or tweaking and you do just all A material. However I have the most fun when I can get on stage and play with ideas.

Here’s my stats for new stuff over the last month:
Hand held mic technique went from a D to a C+
Invisible deck like routine went from D to a B
Spoon and Fork went from C to B
Drawing routine went from B to A
Foam hand went from D to C
Game show went from D to B

Having 66 shows to start to level up routines is a good use of the run of shows! I feel like I left there a better performer, writer and magic creator!

-Louie

Halloween Gigs…

Today is National Magic Day, Halloween and also probably my least favorite day to perform. When performing for groups kid, family or adults, they all act strange when they are in costume. Some they try to play their character, and the rest just don’t act quite like normal people I don’t like it, and I haven’t really done Halloween gigs in about a decade. Sure, there are reasons ($$$$) that I would take one, so I won’t say that I don’t do them.

The other thing is what people wear isn’t always conducive to participating or enjoying a show. Costumes aren’t necessarily made for comfort, and they are full of visual distractions. Then you have mask which limit visibility and face make up which makes it hard for people to tell what someone’s doing with their face.

I know there are some people that are really into doing Halloween gigs and that’s great, with me not really doing them, there’s more work for everyone else.

-Louie

Try It Yourself…Then Ask For Help…

Last night I was at a sports bar watching hockey and in between periods I popped into the social media and in a group for children’s performers I saw this post:

For fun I wrote 10 of them…I wasn’t doing anything, it was between periods of the hockey game. It wasn’t hard, you just needed to find things that have an “ah”sound or sound similar to that and you’re off!

You’ll notice that I put a little note at the end of my list. The reason I did was that I think one of the problems with magicians is that they try to get people to give them the answer to a problem before they try to solve it first. In my list I put in the work…so should you. It’s not hard, I literally spent 10 minutes coming up with my list.

“sure, it’s easy for you because you’re creative” would be someone’s excuse for not trying. I’m no more creative than anyone else. I just sat down and did the work. I actually farmed out most of the work to an online rhyming dictionary.

Do the work, then show your work when you ask for help. Seeing that people have put in some sort of effort makes a huge difference in the quality of help you get.

-Louie

Firm Prediction…

A few days ago, I wrote about post about rewriting a prediction on larger paper and the trick playing better (you can read it here). I’m now running into a new challenge with the prediction, if there’s a little bit of wind, it will warp and it’s hard to read the whole thing.

The nice thing is that the prediction is revealed and read 1/4 of the page at a time, so if the top bends, that information has already been revealed to the audience. However seeing the whole thing is a better picture.

While I probably won’t have time to try this in the next few days, a solution would to be put a line of tape on the back of it. Maybe just around the edges and and X across the middle. That would give it some support. If that doesn’t work, I could completely line the back with tape. That would essentially be laminating the back of the prediction.

-Louie

Week 8 of the Artist’s Way…

It’s been two months and I’m still going through the book The Artist’s Way. I will say the book is a bit “hippie” for my taste, but if you can get past that, it’s a great book. I honestly think the last eight weeks (the whole book is twelve weeks) have been a very creative time. I’ve really ramped up my creative output of the material in my show.

If you decide to get the book, commit to it. There’s some spiritual stuff that I’m not a fan of, and I just plow through that and do the work. I also feel it’s not written for someone who is out there actively doing their “art” for a living. A lot of the book addresses things that block you from showing people your art. Do the exercises anyway, you may learn a little bit about yourself.

As for creating magic, I find that I’m doing a lot more brainstorming with myself than I used to do. I’m essentially having a morning magic jam in a notebook. It’s great!

Despite all of things I don’t like about the book, the things that I like outweigh them, and I really recommend it!
-Louie

Back At Virtual Again…

I thought I was done with the virtual shows, but last night I was back at it! Doing this show as a nice change of pace from the three shows a day I’m doing at a state fair all month.

This was a corporate gig that was for the employees and their families. This was a fun group! One thing I’ve noticed with virtual shows is the time really flies by, compared to a live show. I think that with an in person show, time travels soo much slower. I think it’s because I’ve done it in person soo much that I have to think less. With the virtual I’m constantly on my toes.

In my virtual show my daughter usually runs the production end of the show and in it I normally do a prediction that she helps me out with, but unfortunately she wasn’t available last night. So I had to had to do it all solo. Running the production part is easy, but doing the prediction was going to be a bit of a challenge. Normally the prediction we do is my “Wheel of dinner”. I was going to modify it to a “wheel of costumes” as the client wanted some Halloween themed tricks. The problem was how I was going to accomplish the trick. With the wheel there are 20 options and it doesn’t force. There are ways to force from the wheel, but I really like just spinning it. It feels random.

It hit me, a while ago I had bought Manifest by Danny Weiser, which is a prediction on a luggage tag and never used it. I hung the luggage tag in the background, and during the course of a trick, I asked someone what they were going to be for Halloween. Then at the end of the trick, I did the reveal of the prediction. It played really well. I like a prediction, where the prediction is not the routine, but a bonus…especially because I takes a lot of the heat off of the method!

-Louie

Levelling Up Magic…

This week is the final week of my “fair” season. I end my run on Saturday after performing 66 shows over 22 days at a State Fair. I really like performing at state and county fairs across the USA in the summer. One of the things that I really like about it is that in my preshow I get to work on tricks and jokes that aren’t ready for the main show.

In my show I have materials that’s A, B and C material. A is the stuff that’s finished and plays well. B are tricks that aren’t quite done yet, they’ll be things missing, like maybe the trick is there, but needs some jokes, or the routine is there, but the method or something isn’t quite right. Finally, there’s the C material, and that’s stuff that’s just ideas.

My goal for the summer is to move as much A material out of the show as I can. I do that by levelling up all the other stuff. I work hard at figuring out what’s missing from the B material, and try to move it up to the A level. Once that happens, I stop doing an A routine and put the former B trick in it’s place.

Then there’s the C material, I work on that during my preshow. The goal is to move it to B or drop it. Some ideas are just that…ideas. They may be great ideas, but they’re not for me or my show. It’s good to learn that fairly early on, so you don’t waste too much time with them. This is also why I’m a huge fan of getting material on stage as quickly as possible. That’s the easiest way to figure out if there’s something there or not.

It’s also crazy how quickly things can level up if you put in the time and effort and you have three shows a day for 22 days to work on them. For example the version of the Invisible Deck that I started doing this month (see an early version here) has moved from a C trick to B+ or A- routine in a few weeks. Once I got the technical side down and then found the presentational hook, it was just polishing it up. The routine works as is now, but there is on small technical thing I’d like to figure out…however if I never solve the problem, the routine works great in it’s current form.

I’m very fortunate to have a venue to actively work on new material!

-Louie

Small Changes…

One of the tricks I’ve been working on, sort of on and off all summer is based on Alan Wong and Luca Volpe‘s The Key of Fate. I’m using their basic framework for the trick, but have changed the props a lot. I’m using totally different forces for the prizes and the method for forcing the winner. The basic effect is you predict the outcome of game and what prize the winner gets.

When I first started doing this I was using a larger piece of paper, but the paper got damaged and all I could find was a smaller piece of paper. The small piece was about 15×10 inches, so still fairly large. The trick wasn’t hitting, but due to my schedule I was having trouble finding time to hunt for bigger paper. The effect was playing just OK with the smaller paper and I was thinking of giving up on it. I was attributing the OK response to my performance. Then I had time to hunt down some giant paper, that’s 30×20 and rewrote the prediction.

Here’s the size comparison:

The new prediction is soo much bigger than the previous one. Much to my surprise, the trick is hitting soo much harder with the bigger paper than with the smaller paper. Sometimes it’s small changes that can make a huge impact to a routine.

Now I’m wishing I had done thing a long time ago, I would have gotten a lot more work on this routine done this summer.

-Louie