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Still Working On It…

Months ago I started working on my version of Goshman’s Cards Thru Newspaper trick. My version ended up taking out everything I didn’t like about the trick, which are the cards and the newspaper. I ended up replacing them with Polaroid pictures and an envelope. It’s still a work in progress.

A couple weeks ago I was invited to be a guest at a magic club meeting that took place over zoom. One thing they did was allow people to perform and get critique from Patrick Martin, who also did a presentation during the meeting.

Only a handful of people took the club up. I volunteered to do something if they had space and wouldn’t get in the way of club member’s having the chance to be critiqued. They had plenty of space, so I did my trick with Polaroid pictures.

There was some great feedback, mostly with how bad my pictures were and how they showed up on the screen. They are 100% correct, here’s a screenshot:

The reflection from my ring light made the picture hard to see. There are a couple of solutions for this:

Spray them with matte spray to dull the gloss
Have the camera behind the ring light and bring the pics past the ring light
Have more contrast between the animal and background in the actual picture
Remake the picture so that it’s not glossy (i.e. fake Polaroid)

I think the final solution will be a combination of all of the above.

Catalog vs Reality…

When I was a kid there used to be an ad in magic magazines for a catalog of illusion plans. They were by Goswick’s Illusions. I remember writing him to get the catalog and based on the one picture of the illusion and the catalog description it was amazing. Somehow 20+ years l stumbled upon his website and he’s still selling his illusion plans.

It was a very interesting watching his demo videos, he has a lot of creative ideas…unfortunately they are poorly executed ideas.

Here’s one of them:

I 100% give him credit for creating his own method and ideas. However magically most of them fall very short of being good ideas. It’s one thing to have an original effect or method, but you need to understand what makes a trick good. Not everything should be sold, have a free plans workbook that’s the bad ideas, or contribute them to a magazine…charging people for them is something that I personally don’t agree with.

Three Ball Routine Props…

A long time ago I wrote a blog post about the three ball routine that I do called Sankey’s Balls. This is a three ball routine that uses two balls, and a third one for the finale. This is the opener for my family shows.

The hard thing about doing a three ball routine is finding suitable small balls. I have a set that I like, but they aren’t made anymore. I needed one more set for one of my cases. I’m trying to have each case have all the props needed for the show in it. So no props move from case to case.

To get another set of balls, I had to make some. This set is fresh out of the mold, I need to trim the fill spots and then they’re good to go.

I made these out of polyurethane and they handle really well.

Being A Good Guest…

A while ago I was doing a video hangout with some friends and somehow the idea of having my daughter as a guest on one of their livestream shows. Well, we made it happen a bit ago and it was a lot of fun.

Here’s the thing, it wasn’t easy and that’s the problem, so many people think they are interesting and that’s enough. Here’s the truth, you aren’t interesting, you need to make yourself interesting.

How do you do that?

Simple, write out a few stories and have them ready to tell. Watch some of the previous shows and try to anticipate what the host will ask you and then write some jokes or stories as answers. You may never need them, but the act of preparing puts you a step ahead.

Then something unplanned happens, like on the show last week, there was no audio for the first 10 minutes. The first thing we did was look at what we had prepared that was visual that we could do. We had a few things, and we also played with it.

Having the mindset of having to work to be interesting and fun, instead of thinking we were interesting definitely gave us an advantage!

Here’s the whole interview (keep in mind there’s no audio for the first about 10 minutes): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/704662019

Magic Conventions…

One of the silver linings to the entertainment industry being closed due to COVID is that I can go to different magic conventions. I’ve always been curious about KIDabra, which is for family entertainers. This year they are having a virtual convention, and I’m lecturing at it!

I’ve got some fun stuff to share with the group, including the full version of my Spoon Stunt which has never been taught before!

Louie Foxx KIDabra 2020 from Mark Daniel on Vimeo.

The line up looks great, if you’re a family performer, you should check it out!

Triggers…

A couple of days ago I posted a video of a coin production and vanish I had played with a little while ago. Then a day later I posted a video of a short routine idea with that coin production. Those videos were works in progress, and it’s still a work in progress, however I’m working on solving one of the problems, which is probably one of the biggest problems. That is triggering the coin appearance or vanish.

Essentially I needed to design a triggering system for the coin. Here’s what I came up with:

I designed it and it’s 3d printing right now. I’ll assemble it later today and hopefully it will work without any major redesigns!

Magician Foolers…

There’s a genre of magic tricks that I’m not really into and those are what are frequently called magician foolers. The main reason for this is that I don’t perform for audiences of just magicians very often. When I do perform for just magicians, I do my real world stuff. One thing to keep in mind is that just because it’s a trick for general audiences, doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t fool magicians.

What I’m writing about today are tricks that are specifically designed for audiences of magicians. Recently I’ve discovered an interesting principle, for doing a reverse three card monte type effect, where the audience mixes the cards and you always find the money card. I thought it was a interesting little thing and that’d be that, until I did it for a couple of magicians and it floored them! We spend the afternoon jamming with it and we added a second phase, but we’re still at it being a trick for magicians.

I think the important thing was for me to recognize what this probably is, it’s a trick for 2 am in the lobby of a magic convention. I’m going to keep playing with it and hopefully figure out something more mainstream to do it with.

Tiny Cannon…

Yesterday’s post I wrote about making a cannon for my flea circus. The existing, public domain design wasn’t what I wanted, so I built my own from the ground up. Here’s what I printed:

I still need to clean up the edges and there’s some tweaks to the design, but I think it looks fine and hopefully it will be functional. I don’t have any flash paper, so I can’t try it until later today when I can drive to Market Magic Shop and pick some up.

Fingers crossed it will work!

Building a Better Cannon

The other day I was chatting with another performer who is building a flea circus and I mentioned I’ve 3d printed a couple. Right now there’s a small cannon 3d file on the internet that some people are using for their flea circus’s, however in my opinion it’s pretty big:

One of the reasons for its size is that it holds a party popper inside of it. Also it wasn’t designed for a flea circus. Because of this, it’s not going to scale down smaller if you still want it to shoot out the party popper.

Personally I don’t need it to shoot the party popper, so designed a cannon to shoot out flash paper.

This will be printed in two parts, that’s so that I don’t have to deal with supports in the print. This will speed up the printing process, and I’ll just glue the two together.

To give you an idea of size, the light blue base is about 1.5 inches in diameter. It’s printing right now, so we’ll see how it turns out!

Three Card Monte…

One of the things that I do every now and then is get a deck of gaffed cards and try to figure out tricks to do with the different trick cards. I don’t read/watch the instructions, that makes this a fun creativity exercise. Right now in my office I have a deck of the Ultimate Gaff Deck that I bought because I was playing around with a four ace trick and needed some double backers.

This pack is sitting on my desk and I opened it this morning and the first thing that I noticed is that there is a set of cards for a three card monte using double ended cards. I took the cards out, set them on the table, then immediately thought, “why do all the monte routines that use these cards have them flat?”

When you see this trick done in movies or for real on the street, the cards are always bent.

The only reason that I can think of is that having them bent changes the handling a little bit. If you think about the time that these gimmicked three card monte routines started getting popular with Unconquered Card by Mike Rogers and Micheal Skinner’s Ulitmate 3 Card Monte, I bet writing up a routine with them bent would have been rough and made the routines harder to sell.

You can hide the gimmicks just fine with the cards bent.

I’m planning on playing with them today and see if I can come up with a short routine with them.