A couple of nights ago my local magic club hosted a lecture by Fred Blanco (Wildcat Jackson) who talked about character development. I’d seen this lecture before at another magic club and when I had the chance to bring him in to the Emerald City Wizards magic club, I took him up on it.
What I like about Fred’s talk is that he breaks character down pretty well. It’s a something you don’t need a theater degree to understand. He does a great job of teaching beginner level character, that’s accessible to everyone.
It was a fun night, and Fred also has a ton of cool props!!!
Last week I ended up with a ticket to the Chicago Magic Lounge’s Virtual Happy Hour. I’ve never been in person to the venue, and on video it looks like a cool place. I think tickets are $15 and we had four magicians, a mixologist and a host. All of the performers were performing live at the venue except for one that was in another country.
I didn’t get a picture of the host Benjamin Barnes, however he did a great job introducing the acts. Personally, I would have liked to see him do a set in there somewhere.
All of the acts used audience participation, with the helper on screen. They were in engaging, and the audience was fairly active in the chat.
One interesting thing that happened during the show was at one point when someone was picked to help out onscreen the guy said something like, “I thought this was all fake…“. What he meant was that he thought everyone helping was a stooge.
That comment raises an interesting question: Do most audience members think these shows use stooges? I don’t know if there’s a way to keep people from thinking that. People have the same thought at in person shows, so it’s not unique to a zoom show. This is more of a concern for a ticketed show than it is for a corporate zoom show.
Back to the Chicago Magic Lounge, for $15 it’s a solid show and worth checking out online. I think the overall run time was about 2 hours.
This week I’ve written about putting together and interactive coin trick. Today, we’re putting it all together the force and the coin gimmicks. Here’s an example of what the trick could look like:
I like how the vanish at the end gives the trick a feeling of closure. It also builds off of the mini effect of knowing they picked the dime.
This is my first attempt at creating an interactive virtual magic trick from scratch. I think I did alright.
Yesterday I wrote about working on an interactive coin trick (read it here). This is the style of trick where the person (or group) follows your instructions and you predict where they end. My version has a physical trick kicker that ends with a vanish of all the coins that the audience isn’t holding.
Today I’m going to talk about the procedure that I’m using to force the coins. I came up with my own force sequence for this routine. If you’ve just read Jim Steinmeyer’s Impuzziblities books, they don’t really teach you how to create your own sequence. That’s OK as that’s not the purpose of those books.
The book Body Mentalism by Juan Pablo Ibanez really does a good job of laying out principle that will allow you to create your own sequences. Right now with these “do as I do” interactive style tricks being very popular, I really recommend you get the book to understand the principle. I think knowing why the forces work is good knowledge to have in your head…even if you don’t intend on creating your own sequences.
Okay, let’s get to the sequence I came up with for the trick. You lay out four coins in a row, two pennies and two nickels. They are in this order:
Penny – Nickel – Penny – Nickel
You have them touch any coin, then explain the “rules”. These are you will give them two things to spell, and they move one coin per letter. The first thing they spell is the name of the coin they are not touching. If they are touching a penny, they will spell N-I-C-K-E-L and if they are touching a nickel they will spell P-E-N-N-Y.
Now you have them spell the name of the coin that they are now touching. For example, if they are now touching the penny, they spell P-E-N-N-Y. The coin they are touching is now their new selected coin.
If they followed your instructions they will now be touching a nickel.
This sequence by itself isn’t very strong, but when you add the vanish of all the other coins, it becomes a pretty decent trick.
One of the things that’s huge in magic right now are the tricks where the spectators at home follow along with what you do and you end up knowing what they are thinking of. I wrote about my thoughts on this recently, and you can read that blog post here. Basically I want to use add magic to the puzzle to make it more magical.
After the blog post, I wanted to come up with an original trick, with an original puzzle. The trick was going to use coins, so I went out a bought a 21 Cent Trick and a $1.35 Trick at my local magic shop. With these two sets added to the array of trick coins I already had at home, it would allow me a lot of options for the routine.
The premise I was going with was a coin would be selected and all of the coins would disappear. The problem I was having was with the sequence of the counting. There was too much of it.
I finally settled on using two pairs of coins, two pennies and two nickels. In the end they pick a nickel, and the other three coins disappear and there’s just a nickel left.
Performing a live, virtual show over Zoom it a lot more involved than most people think. Last night I gave a talk about and demonstration about Hand Shadow Puppets and taught a magic trick for the Washington State Parks Great Camp In over Zoom that was broadcasted on YouTube live.Here’s a side by side of what’s happening in the room and what is going out on YouTube.
The person I’m talking to is the host of the show, who is in another location.
The person in the room is my daughter who is running production for me.
For a bit of context, the speaker before me just gave a presentation about bats.
One of my goals when doing virtual shows is to do something that makes my daughter who is running production to laugh. I want to try to crack her up. During the bat presentation before mine, I quickly downloaded the flying bat graphic and added a button to my stream deck. Right before I was live, I told her she could hit the bat effect button anytime during the intro interview or the extro interview. She added the throwing of the physical stuffed bat without me knowing.
I got her to laugh, but also it puts energy and fun into the presentation! A lot of the virtual shows I’ve seen are missing energy and fun. I’m not saying you need to be bouncing off the walls, but so many are performed like they aren’t people watching at the other end of the camera. Figure out how to make the virtual show fun for you to do, and that goes a long way for the audience!
I’m not a fan of doing shows for Halloween (you can read a post from last year here). I do have a no contact, socially distant magic show today, and I’m not really looking forward to it for the reasons listed in last year’s post. I am looking forward to seeing how my 30 min no contact magic show plays. Up until now I’ve only done 20 mins, so it’s a lot longer of a show.
Here’s a Halloween magic trick I created for another performer called Up The Candy Ladder, and published in Vanish Magazine (edition 75):
The nice thing about right now is that a trick like Up the Candy Ladder that uses no one from the audience and heavily gimmicked props is super practical right now!
Recently I started doing a torn and restored card with a postcard. When I started doing it I was using a old promo postcard that had my picture on it. Right now I’m using the idea of a “staycation” for the theme of the trick, so I had my daughter make me a postcard to use for the trick.
One of the things about this postcard that I learned from watching video of the old promo postcard is that the glossy coating makes it hard to see, it’s just a lot of glare. The current batch of postcards have a matte finish, that solves the glare problem.
The thing with creating tricks is that it’s fixing a lot of small problems really adds up to make the bigger picture better!
For years I’ve been a huge fan of Richard Himber, he’s put out a lot of great, innovative magic. I’m not sure why I’ve never bought his book, however recently there have been a lot of them on the market, so the price got pretty low and I picked one up.
This honestly isn’t the best book. The first half is basically instructions sheets, it’s still interesting if you’re a Himber fan, but there’s not a lot you can do out of the book as they really don’t go into how the prop was made. One of the descriptions of what the prop went something like, “it’s like a duck pan with box of cards…” without pictures, it’s not much help. I think whoever worked on the book was a friend of his and not really a magician.
However, it is an interesting book if you’re into magic history and it is more magic knowledge going into my brain. It got me thinking, why did the Himber Ring and Himber Wallet get those names. Those aren’t the original names that those props were given?
One thing Himber knew was how to market his magic, they have reproductions of his ads and he sells it! His fame as a band leader really helped him with the style of selling he did, and it wouldn’t have really worked for most other people.
My verdict is that if you’re into Himber and can snag the book at about $40 you’ll enjoy it.
Last night I stumbled upon someone on Facebook writing about the episode of Masters of Illusion that I was recently. Basically the guy crapped on everyone that was on that episode. I was going to reply, but that really doesn’t do anything positive. Not that this post is going to be super positive.
Something I started doing a few years ago when someone craps on someone online is to research them. Not anything crazy, just check out their website and maybe watch their promo video. That tells you a lot about the person, and what filter they see the world in.
In this particular case, the person who wrote the post about the show isn’t my demographic based on their promo video. They were doing 1970’s style magic in an 1970’s way. There’s nothing wrong with that, however it’s not what I prefer to watch. He’s stuck in an older style of magic, and I think anything new or edgy probably isn’t his flavor. I can see that he’s stuck performing in a style of the magic he probably saw in his 20’s and never decided to grow. He does a Jimmy Hoffa joke in his promo video, Hoffa disappeared in 45 years ago, I had to google that…that’s how fresh the joke is!
If that’s his “art” cool. It’s not my “art”.
If you ever put anything out there into the world and someone doesn’t like it, before you get upset, look at the lens that they are looking at you through. It gives you a lot of perspective.
