Pictures – Page 22 – MagicShow.Tips

The Handbook for School Assembly Performers by John Abrams

A couple of months ago John Abrams sent me a review copy of his new book The Handbook For School Assembly Performers and it’s fantastic!

I think this is a fantastic book, and as someone who has a done a ton of school assemblies, I learned a lot from the book!

Here’s the blurb I wrote for the book:

Holy cow, I wish I had this book when I started doing school assemblies a couple of decades ago! It would have knocked off about 3+ years from the learning curve.

The book reveals one of the biggest mysteries of school assemblies, “What is a teachers guide and how to I create one”. Then John also covers the nuts and bolts of actually doing the gig from when you wake up to the marketing calendar after the gig is completed.

One huge thing for me, which I’ve never read about is how to deal with “burn out” when you’ve done a ton of shows, and he give you some great strategies to keep it fresh! If you’ve ever thought of going into the school assembly market, this book will take you from 0-60 in no time!

If you are interested in performing in schools, or doing some sort of educational or themed program for kids, this book is a will help you a ton! Even if you’ve already done hundreds of school shows, this book will have a few things or approaches you didn’t think of or don’t do.

I highly recommend The Handbook For School Assembly Performers!

-Louie

Applause Please 2: The Encore

I’m excited that I should have another batch of Applause Please 2: The Encore ready in early November! This is my Object in Lightbulb routine. You get the props for two routines; Liquid in Lightbulb and Silk in Lightbulb, plus a couple of ideas for other routines with it.

The applause boxes are being made by Ackerly Builds (Phil Ackerly) and look great so far! I can’t wait for them to be completely finishes, so that I can add the electronics and a few other parts and start shipping them out!

There are only a dozen available in this batch and you can get them at:
https://www.magicshow.tips/applause-please-2-the-encore/

-Louie

3d Printing a Vintage Magic Trick

Sometimes I see a picture of a magic trick and try to figure out what it does. Someone posted this picture of a box in a magic group on social media:

It’s a trick where you push the pins though a coin. I thought that this looked like a fun little 3d printing project, so I made a simple version of it. My version had a nested lid instead of a hinged lid.

And if you want to see it work, here’s a demo of it:

@louiefoxx What does it do? #mysterybox #coin #magic #cointrick #magictrick #3dprint #louiefoxx #nails #spike #figureitout #reveal ♬ original sound – Louie Foxx

This is an easy 3d print as it’s only two parts. You just need the coin and four nails. If you’d like a copy of the .stl file to make your own, contact me and ask for it!

-Louie

3d Printing Vintage Magic Parts!

A couple of months ago I got a Leon’s Improved Glass Penetration by Merv Taylor.

Great Leon Glass Penetration by Merv Taylor

It appears it should have a dozen spikes, plus two hooked spikes, and mine only came with six. Five regular spikes and one of the hooked spikes. These are something that was custom made for the trick, so it’s not something I can just go to the hardware store and buy.

This is where my 3D printer comes in handy. I designed a replica of the spike and printed it out!

The test one came out great, now my next step it to print out a full set of them! I do still need to try to create the hooked spike. I’d like the set to match.

-Louie

Production Totes

When making deliveries, Amazon uses these totes to haul packages:

I don’t know if they’re common enough for people to recognize what they are. They collapse flat and I think they could be converted to a magic prop. It wouldn’t be hard to make one into a tip over trunk. You would also simply put a panel that flips up on the bottom and put it on a mirror base and you’re good to go.

The challenge is that I don’t think they’re quite super common knowledge like a milk crate was. Maybe in a couple of years…

-Louie

Finished Ginosko!

I finally finished reading Ginosko. This is a fantastic magic book, what I like about it is that it’s not just tricks. The whole back half is advice from other magicians and people in David’s life.

For me the routine from the book that’s worth the price of the book is “Asking the 8 Ball”. It’s a transposition of a selected card with the 8 of the same suit. One of the things that makes this great is how the end of the trick where the actual transposition happens, the audience kinda figures it out on their own. What I mean by that is when we get to the point where I reveal the selected card isn’t where it should be, the audience member automatically reaches down and reveals the transposition with any guidance from me.

It’s really a great moment.

There’s tons of other great material and advice in it. There’s a fun vanishing bottle routine in it, I won’t do the routine, but got me thinking about an idea for the vanishing bottle. The book helping me make a connection to something else is always valuable to me!

Another trick that hits really hard is “Post-it Crane”. This is a cool trick, but I don’t think it’ll really ever end up in my main close up magic set because I don’t have the pocket space for a post it pad and the “gimmick”. When I have done it, it’s been for small groups of about 4 people and it absolutely amazes!

This book is cheap at like $25 and totally worth picking up! I got mine at Misdirections Magic Shop.

-Louie

Vanishing Bird Cages – Vintage!

Recently I had a magician reach out to me to let me know there were some vanishing bird cages in a magician’s estate. I didn’t have much information to on as to what one of the cages was.

Obviously one of them is a Milson Worth Silver Meteor vanishing bird cage. This one is cool, because I’ve owned dozens of Milson Worth cage, but never had the instructions, until now!

Now for the interesting cage, the one that’s not clear as to who made it. There wasn’t a lot of information that I could pull from the pictures, so I totally took a gamble when buying it.

Here’s the cage:

It looks a lot like my Owen Magic vanishing bird cage, so here they are side by side:

The dimensions are exactly the same. There are a couple of small differences. The cage I just got isn’t stamped “OWEN” where the cage on the left that’s 100% and Owen is stamped. The lack of a stamp doesn’t mean that it’s not an Owen, as there was a period decades ago were many weren’t stamped. The Owen cage that I already has was much more modern.

Another difference between the two cages are the corner pieces.

The modern Owen cage on the right appears to have the ends peened, where the mystery cage looks like they’re peened and a blob of solder is added. I was chatting with a friend of mine and he found an old Owen Magic Supreme catalog and the ends of the corner bars also have the solder blobs!

This catalog is from the 80’s and back then the Challenge Cage Mystery was $97.50!!!

After asking around a bit, I got this little bit of information:

The size of the rails match those dimensions.

Based on all of this, I’m now 99% confident to call this birdcage and Owen Challenge Cage Mystery!

One problem is that one of the corners needs a repair, it’s missing the solder blob.

I’m sending this out to my birdcage guy and he’s going to repair it and polish up the cage!

-Louie

PS: if you come across a vanishing bird cage, feel free to reach to me to see if I’m interested in buying it!

Simple but Ugly

In using projection at my shows over the summer I learned that some projectors or TV’s will “time out” and turn off if they don’t think they’re getting a signal. The camera I use has a black out option that I used to use, until I learned that the black out can be interpreted as no signal and the TV or projector will go into sleep mode.

To solve this problem, I 3d printed a simple camera cover for my iphone and glued it on.

This is a very simple, low tech way to solve the problem. The camera is still sending a picture to the screen, so it won’t got into sleep mode.

For these shows I didn’t want to run the camera through my laptop and use my Media Star to control it. That’s way too much set up and gear for a library show.

-Louie

Cheap Bicycle Playing Cards!

About a month ago I was told that Walmart had bricks of bicycle cards for $14! It turns out these are a clearance item, so once they’re gone, they’re gone. I’ve been buying them up whenever I find them on my travels.

There are still some out there at Walmart’s, but I’m finding them less and less now. If you go looking, they usually be with the playing cards OR in the clearance section of the store.

Just a note, if you’re going out looking for them. I found a box that was still labeled at $29, but I took it to the register and when I scanned it, it came up at $14. So if you see the higher price, it should ring up at $14!

Good luck finding them!
-Louie