Pictures – Page 15 – MagicShow.Tips

Silent Movie

A few weeks ago we went to see a silent movie with the music played by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. This show was sold out and it was a ton of fun.

When watching the movie one of the things that surprised me was the length of time that the title/dialog cards were shown for. It felt like they were either shown way too long or not long enough to read them.

When I was a kid in a high school journalism class we were told that you were supposed time yourself reading the words and add two seconds and that was how long you displayed them.

What does this mean for magic?

Well when you talk, especially telling jokes you need to make sure the whole (or most of) audience has caught up to the end of the set up before you do the punchline. For a magic effect, you need to display at the end long enough for the whole audience to realize what happened and process the magic effect.

– Louie

Dunninger Epherma!

We bought a house a few weeks ago and are moving. One of the fun things about moving is finding things that I had forgotten that I had. This tie clip turned up!

This tie clip belonged to Joseph Dunninger! I have that a few other things that were his. I need to figure out a way to display it, for now it’ll sit on my desk!

-Louie

Story Master Class with Jeff McBride

One of the things I’m trying to be better about in 2025 is being better. Just improving at anything/everything that I do. It’s to not plateau, which is easy to do, you just get lazy.

One of the things that I did was take a class at Mystery School with Jeff McBride. This was the Story Master Class, and was all about telling your story. This was an online class, so it happened over Zoom.

This was my first time taking a class from Mystery School, and I was impressed. It was really well thought out, was homework each week for the three weeks and even David Copperfield popped in to give his thoughts on storytelling!!

I feel like I learned a lot from the class and really covered a lot of different styles of telling stories, with an emphasis on telling your personal story. I really liked the class and while I try to have some sort of personal hook for every routine that I do, I think it makes me want to dig a little deeper and put more of my story into the full routine.

If you’ve been on the fence about a workshop with Mystery School, I really liked the class that I took, jump in an take one!

– Louie

Shipping Your Gear

For the last few years I’ve kept Apple AirTags in my luggage when travelling. Now that I’m flying to more events with my Crank Organ, which is shipped ahead, I’ve added one of them it so that I have an extra layer of tracking.

Normally I ship it to a UPS Store, but recently for an event in Reno, I didn’t have that option. I sent it to the casino directly and in the past when shipping thing to hotels, it’s been less than a good experience. In the past I’ve gone to the desk to pick up a package and they can’t find it. After 10 minutes of me insisting that it was delivered, my package magically appears.

Now with the AirTag, I can help them find it by making it make noise, or showing them where it is in the app!

If you travel, put an AirTag in everything that you don’t hand carry!

-Louie

Stages!

It’s crazy how the stages that I perform on vary. One night I’m on this stage that’s state of the art with a 7 person tech crew!

Then the next show I’m on a stage like this with very minimal tech and no crew.

How I do my show, the core show is without any production and when I can use production, it’s a bonus! However it’s a bonus that I’ve planned for!

-Louie

The Story of One Card Pete – Elmer Applegate

I love finding old magic, and recently I found something really cool (I”ll post about it another day), but inside of that there was a folded up piece of paper. This is from the mid 1940’s and it had the typed routine for Elmer Applegate’s The Story of One Card Pete!

Elmer Applegate's The Story of One Card Pete

This is a routine for a six card repeat style where you have five cards, take away one and still have five. It’s an interesting routine, and the patter is rhyming. Jeff McBride has a really cool version of it and worth trying to track down the video of.

-Louie

Inject 2 – Down for the 3rd Time This Year!

Another day, another Inject 2 outage! We’re just over 3 weeks into 2025 and this is the 3rd time that Inject 2 has stopped working. The first two times it was down about a week each.

Once again, this highlights the problems with internet based apps and sort of apps in general. If a magic app stops working, there’s not much you can do. It’s also hard to run a backup method with an app. You can’t have someone type into Google AND write it on a piece of paper at the same time.

The now frequent outages can affect performances:

I’m appalled that Greg doesn’t immediately let the major magic shops know when Inject 2 is down so they can pause sales. It’s still available at Penguin and Vanishing Inc AND Greg is at MagiFest, where both companies are right now!

Finally, Greg Rostami has talked about this “back up plan” for Inject 2 for almost a month now, but hasn’t started to implement it. He says it will take a month to do, well guess what, if he started it the first time, it’d almost be up and running.

Here’s my theory: If Greg switches Inject 2 to another server or whatever the backup plan is, he’ll have to relist it as a new app. That means current users will have to rebuy it, and he’ll have to deal with refunds from people who just bought it.

I hope that the app does get back up and reliably running as many magicians like it, but it teaches magicians that you can’t rely on technology that’s out of your control.

– Louie

Showcase

Last week I was at an entertainment showcase. These are where performers do a bit of their show for people who book acts/shows. When watching bands, my number one note for them is to not talk! The amount of banter they do is ridiculous, it’s not a show, you’ve got 15 minute to wow a booker and when they waste 3-5 mins on uninteresting talking on the mic, their show doesn’t look tight.

I love it when I see an act come in to get booked. A good example is Patrick, he came in did a high energy 15 minute set with no wasted time!

I was there showcasing my crank organ as a “roving act”. This is different from stage showcase, you can connect with people differently and have more time. My roving showcase had 45 minutes.

With that time I try my best to connect with people and educate them on how they can use this act at their event. Trying to sell something like the crank organ for events is a bit harder because most people have never seen one and don’t know how they’d use it for their event.

If you’re not using showcases to sell your show, you should look into them, virtually every market has some sort of showcase!

-Louie

Magic Travel Tips

When I travel I hand carry my audio/electronic stuff box. I’m paranoid about losing this, so I put an Apple AirTag in it. I set this AirTag to alert me if I leave it somewhere. So if I walk away from the audio case, my phone will let me know!

While I’m mentioning travel tips, I don’t use luggage tags on my bags. Instead I write my name and phone number on my luggage with a marker!

Now there’s no luggage tag to get ripped off, my info is on my luggage permanently!

-Louie

Being Seen Offstage!

When you perform and there’s a stage, use it! It took me a while to learn this, and I’m glad I figured it out a long time ago. Before I go further, there are times and reasons to be in front of the stage, or in the audience, so this isn’t a hard rule.

Here’s an example, I was watching a performer do the cups and balls and they’re performing on the floor in front of the stage. Here’s what I could see sitting in the back:

The lady standing was moving to the back to where she could stand to see. Don’t worry about her, she’s not what this is about. It’s about the cups and balls on the table and about waist height to the performer.

What does this picture tell you?

It tells me that if I’m on the same level as the audience (the floor), anything held below my shoulders can’t be seen six rows back.

So how do you do the cups and balls onstage?

That’s the challenge because if your tabletop is flat, then the people in the front rows can’t see as the bottom of the table is blocking their view.

You could move the table further upstage and that will help a bit. What I did when I used to do cups and balls was put a “rake” to my table, so the front end was lower than the back end. My table also had a small lip that would stop the balls from rolling off. It was a workable solution and an option.

One thing that’s helpful is to watch magic shows from different seats in the audience and pay attention to when you can’t see things. Not just when they’re performing, but if a magician walks into the audience, how much of them can you see? You can use this information to help you decide to go into the audience and if you do, how to do it so that things can be seen.

-Louie