Pictures – Page 116 – MagicShow.Tips

Clear Differences…

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?

The Present…

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.

The Key to Creativity…

A couple of weeks ago I did a magic lecture and was asked about how to me more creative. The first thing you need to realize is that you’ll have a ton of bad ideas, and to get over the fear of failure. Once you’ve done that you are ahead of 99% of people.

The thing that I think is the key to being creative is being able to connect two unrelated things. Whether it’s two tricks or a solution and a problem. This is something I didn’t k now I was doing until I read the book Moonwalking with Einstein. This is a book about memory, and having a decent memory helps you connect things.

The other ingredient to being able to connect two things is having two things in your brain to connect. I recently came across this quote:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
Steve Jobs

I 100% agree with Steve Jobs, you need to have experiences to connect.

How do you get those?

Simple, you go out and live. I’m always out doing things, seeing shows, having adventures and all of that goes into my brain and it gives me more things to connect. I’m also always reading magic books, that give me methods in my brain. I also try to reasonably work through everything I read in a magic book, that gives me a tactile experience in my brain to pull from.

So go out and live and be a lifelong student of whatever your artform is!

Wild Card…

One of the ways to create new methods or routines for magic tricks is to take an existing trick and remove what you don’t like about it. We’ll start with a trick that I don’t like, and that’s Peter Kane’s Wild Card. There’s a lot I don’t like, it mostly is how redundant the trick is, and it lacks an ending. It goes, and the ending is all the cards have changed to the same card, but there’s not punctuation on it.

In Jon Racherbaumer‘s book, The Wild Card Kit, there are a couple of interesting premises. More importantly there are a couple of interesting moves and sequences that take the trick past it’s most basic level.

One notable exception is Eric DeCamp’s version of Wild Card called Jokers are Wild Are Wild. In this version the cards values end up being a blackjack hand and for a finish the cards turn into money. This puts a theme on the trick and a finish that punctuates the routine.

So…what am I going to bring Wild Card?

I’m not sure.

What I don’t like about wild card is:

How redundant the sequence is
How it uses a packet of all the same card
How it doesn’t have an ending

The first two things I don’t like are an easy fix, however the third one will take some work. For the first two, I’ll vary the moves a little bit and for the second I can make a packet of the gimmicks that use different cards, not all the same values. However an ending that makes sense might be harder…

Finally Trying a Trick…

One of the best books on stand up magic as far as tricks go is Jim Steinmeyer’s The Conjuring Anthology. It’s full of mostly stand up style magic, there are other things in there as well, like stage illusions. This book is a tremendous resource.

The Conjuring Anthology by Jim Steinmeyer

Recently I was making a bunch of videos for a client and needed some inspiration. I was flipping through this book and there’s trick that uses confetti in it that’s caught my eye in the past. Essentially loose confetti turns into a full sheet of tissue paper.

I went out, got the stuff to build the prop and got two work on it.

The first thing that I noticed was that this trick is a great lead in to the torn and restored tissue. If you put the two tricks together you’ve got a 3-4 minute routine that takes up virtually no space in your case, or could easily be made in a hotel room.

I’m glad that the project I was working on had me go back and flip though that book. I also think that if I had played with that trick at another point in my life I may not have had the same results as I did.

Try Something New…

A couple of weeks ago I attended KIDabra’s online convention and it was a ton of fun. One of their events a late night balloon jam. I’ve never been to any balloon jam, but then I don’t do balloons. I stopped doing them a long time ago, and when I did it was one balloon animals.

It was a lot of fun to see what balloon people are doing. It’s light years ahead of what they were doing when I decided I wasn’t going to do balloons anymore.

It was very interesting to hear them talk about the business and its challenges. It was good to get out of my comfort zone (magic) and do something I was unfamiliar with. I’d recommend trying new things, I’m not going to start doing balloons, but it was fun.

Spicy Magic!

Currently I’m working on making a bunch of video content for a group and I got to make a fun prop. In the video I’m talking about nachos, and needed a sight gag, so I made this:

I probably put way too much effort in to this 15 second video. Enjoy!
Posted by Louie Foxx- Magic and comedy on Thursday, September 3, 2020

For the gag which lasts less than 10 seconds, I probably spent too much time building it, however it was fun and it’s a fun prop!

The actual build is pretty simple:

The hardest part was driving around town to find the striker. There’s a specific type of lighter that has a striker that can be removed. Once I had source that, I had to figure out how to attach it to either my hand or the jalapeno. I was going to 3d print something, but then tried stabbing it into the pepper and it worked perfectly! Sometimes the simplest way to do things is the best.

Encore Episode!

Looks like I’m back on another encore edition of The CW’s Masters of Illusion tomorrow (9/11/20) night!

The trick that I do in this episode was my opener for corporate and theater shows for a long time. The trick does a good job of setting the audience up for what they are going to see for the next 45 – 60 minutes. It tells them that what they are about to see isn’t a traditional magic show. It also established me as a “talker” and that the show is going to be joke based, but not your typical magician-y jokes.

This trick has gotten me a ton of work whenever I use it at showcases, it quickly becomes the talk of the event!

Let There Be Light!

When you’re doing virtual shows, a lot goes into them. More than just the tricks. Someone recently posted their “promo video” for virtual shows. There are some good elements to this, like the people reacting, then some bad elements, like everything else.

Here’s the video:

The big problem with the video is the guy’s lighting is horrible! Yes, I understand that some of the effects he’s doing require special lighting, but he’s not even doing that right, you can light the effect correctly and make it not look like you’re performing in a closet.

Here’s a screenshot from the above video:

Does that look like something you’d pay money to watch?

Not me.

Does that mean it’s a bad show?

Not necessarily.

Right now we all need to learn about lighting, video production, etc and we all need to learn the basics about all of it.

Virtual MCing!

Today, you can check me out doing some virtual stage hosting for the Coconino County Fair on their facebook page! I’ll be introducing their bands and doing some magic tricks.

When I was a teenager I remember in all of the Karrell Fox boxs there being tons of magic tricks that he used to introduce act. Things like a piece of rope ends up shaped like an acts name, or the chalk magically writes the acts name on a chalkboard. I remember thinking how that was very dated feeling. What I mean by that, is that it doesn’t (to me) feel modern in a live variety show.

Now that I’m doing some of this virtual hosting, things like that kinda make sense. In a virtual video, the trick can happen, then the bands video starts. There’s not lag between me leaving the stage, and the band walking on and getting ready. I’ve gone back and reread a lot of Karrell’s stuff and while the props need to be modernized, the ideas are solid!