Whenever a Facebook Live magic show comes through on my feed, I always try to watch them. It’s interesting the variation in people’s set up and what they think looks good, or at least professional.
Here’s a screenshot from a The Virtual Magic show on Zoom that was broadcast to Facebook a few weeks ago:
The problem with this is that the magician kinda thought about his background, but not enough. He’s got one curtain hung, but for $18 more, he could have bought a second one and had a full background.
The other fix is to crop your picture down. An example below is a screenshot of me at a zoom hangout:
The wider shot shows my office around the edges of my screen. I cropped it out of the outgoing video feed. Little things like that make what you’re doing look a lot more professional…or at least not unprofessional.
It’s kinda nice that my material was spread out during the season, I was on episode #2 and now episode #18. That’s about four months apart, which is better than two back to back episodes, then nothing for the the rest of the season.
I’ll post more about this appearance this when I have more info.
Tomorrow night I’ll be working on some new material at a virtual magic open mic. This is a free show, but it’s ticketed, so to watch you’ll need to go to:
For years I’ve been a huge fan of Jim Steinmeyer, I love his books. I remember reading his Afghan Bands routine in the first Magic Magazine that I ever bought, and have been a fan ever since.
For some reason, I’ve never bought or read his Impuzzibilites books. They’ve been out forever.
I just picked up a full set of the nine books and I’m having a good time reading them. One of the things I love about Jim’s books is that the routines are fleshed out, it’s not just how to do the trick.
What’s cool about Jim’s books is that 99% of the material I will never do. A lot of his stuff is too procedure heavy for my style, however it all inspires me. I makes me want to be better.
In May I started worked on a trick that was my version of Albert Goshman’s Cards Thru Newspaper. You can search for those blog posts, but it shows how the trick progressed from the original Goshman trick to what I’d now consider an original magic trick/routine.
Essentially the original trick is that four cards appear one at a time and reappear under a folded up piece of newspaper. I took out what I didn’t like, the cards and newspaper and ended up using an envelope and four polaroid pictures. The pictures disappear and reappear under the newspaper.
It’s been five months since I started working on it, and really, it should have progressed further, it’s been slow going, mostly because of laziness on my part and not putting in as much work on it as I should be. I’ve been doing it as “preshow” for some virtual shows, but really I should be out at virtual open mics doing it and working it in.
I did recently make a change. I’ve been using this trick in pre-recorded virtual shows lately and a problem the trick had was the problems is that the Polaroid pictures are soo glossy, that they are hard to see on camera. They reflect too much light, and you can’t see them clearly. I took some brochure paper and printed the Polaroid pictures onto that paper. It’s a semi-gloss paper, so while it’s shiny, it doesn’t reflect nearly as much as the actual Polaroid picture.
The row on the left are the real Polaroids and the right are the copies. When they are side by side you can see the copies are a little less vibrant than the originals. However without a side by side comparison, you really can’t tell.
Keep working on your magic, even if you’ve been doing a trick for years and it’s a polished routine. There’s usually still improvements that can be made. Sometimes these are small improvements that no one will really notice, but these little things add up!
When I started out performing magic as a kid, I never thought I would really become a magic creator. I loved performing and loved performing new things I’d read in books. As time progressed I went from creating original patter to then going for original routines and methods.
While I currently write for Vanish Magazine, recently I’ve been in Genii’s Magicana column twice. The first time was for a trick I created and now as part of a trick that I helped work on.
It’s a fun trick called Vampire Cat that uses a deck of cards. There’s a group of us that get together and have little magic jams where we work ideas and brainstorm. This came out of that.
I love it when I’m working on something and things happen quickly. The connections between problems and solutions are quickly found. What started not too long ago with me and a couple of friends ripping up playing cards, quickly became a solid method. Then in my quest to make it play a little bit bigger, I think I hit on something to make it bigger, but also a presentation hook!
I was looking for some of the Phoenix Parlour Cards that I have around here somewhere, and a stack of postcards I send out as “thank you cards” caught my eye. I took one and gimmicked it for the torn and restored card, and it worked!
The cool thing about using postcards is that they are bigger than the Phoenix Parlour Cards, and they are really easy to gimmick (much easier than playing cards). Also if this is something that I’ll be doing in the show, they are cheap and easy to get.
This brings me to something that my friend Robert Baxt always tells me, which is, “can you do it with anything other than playing cards?“. He’s right. I’m a card guy in my heart, but he’s 100% correct, it’s almost always better with something other than playing cards. Also by moving things away from playing cards, you free up a slot in your show to use playing cards. I know freeing up a space for a card trick is not Robert’s intention, but is also means one less space for a card trick!
The last couple of days I’ve written about the torn and restored card that I’m working on. Now that I have the technical end pretty much worked out, the next step is figuring out how to make it work in a show. Right now with virtual shows, it’s easy because I can hold it close to the camera. Once “socially distant” shows are more common, I’ll need to make it bigger than just a playing card.
The original version that Harry Anderson did used a card that was bigger than a jumbo card. Yesterday I made a gimmicked card using a jumbo deck and while it’s visible, the way the current jumbo cards are made, they are too hard to make to be practical for use in every show. That got me thinking about the Phoenix Parlour Decks. These are between a standard deck and a jumbo deck. Being slightly better is a huge advantage for visibility.
While I’d love to be able to do the gimmicked cards in jumbo size, the availability of the old stock jumbo bicycle cards makes this something that would have a limited life. Ideally when I create, whatever I use will still be in production, so I can at least stock up on them.
When you’re running a live virtual show, a lot more goes into it than simply turning on the camera on your laptop. Last night I was hanging out on Zoom with some performer friends and normally I just use my laptop’s built in camera, however I decided to set up the studio. I put up lights and hung the blue screen, and it’s amazing the difference it makes!
In the picture below, both images were taken at the same time by different cameras.
The left was my laptop’s built in camera and the right was an external camera placed about an inch above the other camera. It’s crazy the difference it makes. Even if I cropped down the one on the left, it’d still look blown out, and murkier (probably worse).
You need to look at the product you are putting out, is it watchable?
Last night I saw Helder Guimaraes‘s show The Present at The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Well, sort of, it was over Zoom. The show was really great, I loved it. Helder is the first person I’ve seen who really did the “you do as I do at home” type tricks and make they fun, exciting, and most importantly, not feel like a bunch of procedure.
When you buy your ticket they mail you a box a props to use during the show. What’s cool is it’s not just of a box with a deck of cards and some string in it. It’s a box where he very smartly uses the contents. I don’t want to ruin anything is someone has tickets and hasn’t seen the show, but you’ll quickly notice if you’re paying attention with a magician’s eye that there’s more to it than what it looks like.
I think there are a few more shows at The Geffen Playhouse. I think some have the option of just watching and not having the box mailed to you. If you can afford it, I’d recommend getting the box, you should still have a good time without the box.
