One thing that I’ve been working on is learning to cast things in resin. I’ve been doing little projects for people to give me things to do to learn with. One thing someone asked me to do was make the coin for the Silver Extraction magic trick, but with a Silver dollar instead of the half dollar that it’s traditionally made with.
If you’re not familiar with the trick, here’s a dealer demo of it:
The trouble I was having was getting the coin made in resin without too many air bubbles. After a lot of work and learning, I’ve gotten a workable clear resin coin:
I think if I make another one, I will remake the mold with my newfound knowledge and that will give me an even better result. When I’m learning something new, I love working on projects for friends, as it helps me learn to do thing and try them in ways I wouldn’t normally.
The other night I was having a virtual magic jam and was showing some of my ideas using surgical gloves. Here’s a few of them:
Gloves are interesting to use for magic because they fit have a built in “black art” to them. Also like water they have rules, they have to stretch, are essentially air tight and things can’t get through them. We can now use those rules to our advantage. The old close up black art tricks with thing like the chinatown half no longer need the black card. You just set the coin onto your palm, and they can see right thought it!
I’m not sure that the use of gloves will have much of a life beyond the next year when all of this COVID-19 stuff hopefully is over. I do think that glove tricks are good social media content right now.
In yesterdays post I showed a gimmick that I was making for a video. This video was made because my brother said I should do a cooking show for our weekly “virtual dinners”. A night before our dinner, I had a ton of ideas and wrote out a rough script, and sent it to a buddy of mine who punched it up. I then built the gimmicks and recorded the show.
Here’s what I made:
At about the 9 min mark you can see the gimmick I posted about yesterday. There’s a couple of other interesting magic effects that happen in the video as well. This was what I found interesting about making the whole video was that the cooking was a frame for magic to happen. It was a built in presentation hook.
It took over 12 hours to make this video, and the sole goal of it was to make my brothers laugh. That’s art, money or longevity of it wasn’t a consideration, it was simply to get a reaction. What reaction are the videos your are posting designed to get?
What are you doing to stay creative right now? I’ve got several outlets for creativity, however on of them is new to me. During the self quarantine, my brothers and our families have a virtual dinner once a week. Last week they asked me to do a cooking show, so I’ve been working on that for fun.
One of the things that I came up with was to turn a garlic clove into chopped garlic. The simple solution is to use a thumb tip. I didn’t really want my hands covered in garlic, so I thought about wearing gloves and a then this I covered a thumbtip with the end of glove and it worked great!
Forcing yourself outside of your comfort zone is a great way to get yourself thinking creatively! If the cooking show turns out watchable, I’ll share it here.
About six months ago I had an idea for a trick, essentially it was a signed card changed from a five of spade to a four of spade. You can read my idea for method for this trick here. This is basically the trick “Picking Off The Pips” that I think I read a version of in the Amateur Magician’s Handbook by Henry Hay when I was a kid. The difference is that it’s a signed card.
I was going to make up a card, but time wise never did. Then due to the cancellations of shows due to COVID-19 I was cleaning up my office and found a set of Dry Transfer Decal Card Pips.
This was probably the greatest thing that’s come out of cleaning out the office! Thanks to these I was able to easily make the gimmick for my idea.
The pip I added to the card was a bit smaller than the pips currently on a poker size deck, but I don’t think that will change how the trick works.
The trick hinges on people not being as familiar with a deck of cards as magicians are. I remember as a kid my mom coming home from work and they had a corporate trainer do a thing with a deck of cards. It wasn’t a card trick, but at the end the trainer asked if anyone had noticed anything strange with the cards. My mom was the only one who noticed that the red cards were black and the black card were red. The only reason she caught that is at that time she’d probably picked a hundred cards a week for me while I was practicing tricks. Normal audiences won’t notice.
I’m glad to have the gimmick, unfortunately I there are no audiences to do the trick for right now. I wish I could try it out.
If you’ve seen my magic lecture you’ve heard my favorite quote, which is essentially what my lecture is about. If you haven’t, here’s the quote:
Go past crowd pleasing and into real comedy…
Mel Brooks
He says it on Tom Papa’s podcast, it’s a great interview and you should listen to it. In my lecture I use the quote not just for comedy, but for magic. Sponge balls are crowd pleasing, how do you go past that and get into real magic?
Let’s get back to what I’m writing this post about. Someone in a magic forum had posted a picture of the nest of wands comedy prop that was broken.
If you’re not familiar with the Nesting Wands trick you have large diameter wand and smaller wands keep coming out of it. If you’re not familiar with the prop, here’s it in action:
The sets that are common in the USA have one end that’s sealed, and the person who wrote the Facebook post thought that they were broken and need to be fixed. For me whenever a prop breaks, I look at it as a chance to p lay with the prop and figure out things that may not have been possible before. I’ve had a bunch of cool things come out of props breaking and getting a new view of them.
When I was younger and did magic shows at kids birthday parties, I used this prop. However the set I had were made by Tops Magic in Europe. Most people in the USA didn’t like this set of Nesting Wands because they were open at both ends. I loved them because there was a lot more you could do with them. Here’s some ideas:
When the kid tries to “one up you” and restack them, they will fall out the other end.
You renest them and they all fall onto the floor.
You renest them and they slide out the other end and land in your case, but you don’t notice that. Then once they are all in your case, you look at the wand in your hand and see it’s empty. You then look around for where they went.
When the kid hands them back to you, you drop them all over the floor. You pick up the biggest wand and ask the kid to hand you another wand. They do, you put it into the wand in your hand and it just falls out the bottom ( you don’t notice that) and have the kid keep handing you wands and they keep falling through. Repeat till it’s not funny and at that point start holding the wands in with your finger at the bottom. Once they are all nested, let them drop out and onto the floor!
Look a prop breaking as an opportunity to do something creative and new with the prop. Sometimes you’ll just have a broken prop…other times you’ll have gold!
One of the silver linings of the current “social distancing” is that I’m able to get work on some of my back burner projects, things that I aren’t a priority, but would like to get done. In the past, I have made a couple of giant shells for the three shell game out of a resin, but used a casting method to where the shells weren’t uniform. I’ve wanted to make a set where the shells inside and out were more uniform.
Yesterday I 3D printed a giant shell which will be the original that the other shells will be made from.
The next step is to make a silicone mold and cast them in resin. I’ll probably put a magnet in them so that they handle more like a chop cup than a shell game set.
When someone puts out a magic trick, there are two ways the creator does it. One is how they do it and the other is a dumbed down version for people who don’t want to practice. Personally when I put out a product, I put out what I actually do and use (at the time of putting it out). That way it’s a release that I know inside and out.
A great trick that came out a few years ago, but has mixed reviews is called Split.
The effect is you have a twenty dollar bill and it visually rips into two ten dollar bills. This is a great trick, but the main complaint I saw was the gimmick was obvious. The problem that people weren’t able to see past was that it was designed to be done with non-US currency. The money in other countries is more colorful and the designs hide the gimmick better.
For me it took about a minute of looking at the gimmick to solve the problem. Here’s my gimmick:
Basically I moved the gimmick from the middle of the bill to the edges. There’s a lot more printing to hide it on a US bill.
Then there was a corner of the old bill that was slightly visible when I was doing mirror practice. I covered it with the corner of a bill that matched what it should be. This was a small thing that really wasn’t an issue, it just sorta bugged me.
When you get a trick and you think it doesn’t work, before you write a bad review, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Was the trick designed with European money, or created by someone that’s left handed, or whatever. You many not work exactly as the creator, and you need to be able to adjust.
Apparently I’m pretty guilty of having some disgusting props. I was looking over what I use and my personal set of dice for my Cee Lo (cup and dice) routine are gross. I think how they got this bad is that I’m the only person that handles the dice, so I haven’t gotten anyone to … Continue reading “Clean Up Your Act!”
Apparently I’m pretty guilty of having some disgusting props. I was looking over what I use and my personal set of dice for my Cee Lo (cup and dice) routine are gross. I think how they got this bad is that I’m the only person that handles the dice, so I haven’t gotten anyone to react to their grossness.
The die with the number 1 up is the clean one and when compared to the other die, you can see how gross they were!
Right now is a good time to take a look your props and give them a good wipe down, even if they don’t need it!
One of the things that I try to do is use any “found time” that I have during my day. This is time when you’re just waiting. Here’s an example, over the weekended I did three shows at a church. There was about a 20 minute service, my show, then 40 minutes before the next … Continue reading “Found Time…”
One of the things that I try to do is use any “found time” that I have during my day. This is time when you’re just waiting. Here’s an example, over the weekended I did three shows at a church. There was about a 20 minute service, my show, then 40 minutes before the next service started. That gave me a lot of gaps in my day that’s bonus stuff to get done.
I packed my laptop and got some work done after my show and before the next service had started.
Essentially that gave me about half an hour between shows to get work done, which is great! That’s time I would have had to find elsewhere in my life. Then after the service started, while I was waiting for my show, I stood in the back of the room and worked on a card sleight. That’s also practice time that I’d have to find somewhere else in the day.
Being a good steward of your time is something that I think is important. Yes, it’s okay to waste time and just chill out, that’s important, however if I can use some time during gaps in my day to get things done, I’m happy to do it!
