One huge thing with this school assembly tour is efficiency. Honestly, I’m not getting paid a ton, so wasting time loading in and out isn’t a good use of my time. The show loads in and out in one trip.
My road case has wheels on the bottom of it and I have handle that attaches to the front of it that I use to pull it.
One trip without a dolly or hand truck makes this a quick load in and out.
-Louie
Magic has a long history of appropriating Asian culture, from people performing in yellow face to props having random Chinese characters put on them to make them look exotic.
I have a prop that has Chinese on it that actually makes sense. A couple of years ago I made a production box out of a take out box from a Chinese restaurant. This idea had been in a notebook years earlier, but I finally got around to it in 2020.
This box is the first trick in the school assembly show and gets a huge reaction! In the show I use it to produce a tennis ball, while saying producing a tennis ball from a take out box doesn’t really make sense, in the routine it does make sense.
This little box is crushing it in the show!
-Louie
Out here on this tour, sometimes the travel time between shows is very tight and I don’t have very much time to set or strike the show. I provide everything except electricity. Knowing that some shows I may not have much time to set, need to pack out quickly, or both, I have two set ups for the show.
The normal set up takes about 20-25 minutes to set up and I use this when I have plenty of time to set up and strike.
Here’s the normal set up:
The quick set up/strike takes about 10-15 mins and I use it when I have tight travel time.
Here’s what it looks like:
The big difference is that I don’t have the banner. It also doesn’t use a speaker stand for the PA. A difference you can’t see is that the quick set up doesn’t use a wireless headset mic. Those few things make a huge difference in set up/strike time.
I use the handheld mic with a stand or a mic hanger for when I need to use my hands. I’m really glad that about a year and half ago I decided to learn to use a handheld microphone. Having practiced with a handheld really makes me a lot more versatile!
-Louie
In the new school assembly show I do a trick with apples and oranges. It’s based on Jim Steinmeyer’s Apples and Oranges trick from his book Conjuring. The concept is the same, the the routine is completely different.
I’ve notice that about every 2-3 shows I have kid in the audience when I introduce the apples and oranges that will yell out, “they’re fake” and the kid is correct, they’re plastic. What puzzles me is that kid will fixate on the fact that they aren’t real and keep yelling out “they’re fake“, even after I agree with the kid that they aren’t real fruit.
I’ve tried different ways to deal with this, and yesterday I wrote the line, “they’re not real, I got them from Ikea…So they’re made of particle board and Swedish meatballs”. The goal is to address the issue before the kids says anything. I’ve done it at 2 shows and so far I haven’t had anyone yell out anything.
One challenge with this line is that I’m in North Dakota and there isn’t a Ikea for about 700 miles! The line gets a small laugh from the adults, and not much from the kids. this is better than nothing, however I think I need to write a better line…
-Louie
Week two of the school assembly tour starts today, I was off on Monday due to the holiday. This show was written for elementary school audiences and is a language and literacy themed show.
On Friday of last week, at my second show of the day was for a small school, so they invited all grades, kindergarten through 12th grade! That’s a huge swing of kids. When I learned of the age range, I went to my car and grabbed my emergency show prop bag.
I took out the deck of cards and did ACAAN as the warm up and won over the high school kids.
One cool thing that I noticed was that elementary school aged kids were who the show was written for, it mostly works for high school aged kids. There’s some silly stuff that wouldn’t get laughs if I was doing it just the high school kids, but the every trick got a good reaction from the older kids. That means the magic in the show is strong!
This is something I’ve always said that a lot of kid shows are missing…strong magic!
-Louie
I started the tour on Monday and had to cancel all of Tuesday’s show because my radiator had a hole magically appear! I had to do some sweet talking to the mechanic in a small town to get him to fit me into his schedule. It helps that his grandchild was at my show, and liked the show.
I’ve often said that magic is problem solving, so is magic on the road. In my first show on this tour I use Phil Smith’s Quinta Force and did the very basic math incorrectly in my head and forced the wrong object. With some quick thinking and a solid foundation in magic and mentalism principles I was able to make the trick work and no one knew that I had majorly screwed up the trick!
The moral of today’s blog post is that you need to be flexible, not just in your magic show, but in life.
-louie
Today is the first day of the school assembly tour and the first full performances of my new show called Incredible Idioms. This show is themed about the language we use and it’s been a lot of fun to work on.
The whole show fits inside one case and here’s what it looks like:
Unfortunately it doesn’t really travel set up. It’d be nice to just open the case and go, but there’s a lot of crushable things in there AND that picture doesn’t show things like my mics and audio cables which need to travel in the case.
The show is going to probably go through a lot of changes over the month of performing it on this tour. This is where the work comes in. I need to record, at least audio record and hopefully video record as many shows as possible and review them as often as possible. This is how a show gets good in a short amount of time.
Well, off to the first gig…
-Louie
One thing I’m not is a huge magic collector. Sure, I have more stuff than what’s in my current show, but I don’t have a ton of stuff in bins that’s not used (there are a couple of bins, just not many).
One of the things I’ve wanted for a while as a display piece is a talking skull. Not the more modern ones that look like they are made out of a plastic halloween skull, but an older paper mache one.
I got this one at a Potter and Potter auction for a price that I was willing to pay for it. It didn’t come with instructions, and luckily Abbott’s Magic Company sells them for $4. It’s super clever how the gimmick works, and I would have figured it out…eventually. I’m thinking I might change it to a remote control, so I can make it talk on the shelf in my office.
I like this on my shelf, and I’m glad I picked it up!
-Louie
Over the summer I worked with a balloon show, and his show is a great illustration of why it’s important to use the stage. If you are standing in front of the stage, it does help you mentally with the energy exchange with you and the audience, however you sacrifice visibility.
Here’s how the show looked from the 4th row at the audience’s eye level:
You can’t see much, and the way the audience in the back filtered out, that confirmed that they couldn’t see. Here’s what the show looked like from the extreme side:
There’s a lot more going on in the show that the audience a couple rows back can’t see. If you are on the same level as your audience and they aren’t sitting directly on the floor, everything needs to be at your armpits or higher. Any lower and it just disappears when you’re in the 3rd row or further back.
This post should be a reminder to audit your show and look for places where things aren’t visible to the audience when you’re performing on the floor. Visibility is why Axel Hecklau’s Just a Cup is superior to most chop cup routines, the action isn’t stuck on the table…and you aren’t stuck behind a table!!
-Louie
A couple of weeks I wrote a post about making a themed What’s Next prop that’s a road sign with bullet holes in it.
I ordered a cheap What’s Next prop that was black with white spots. I peeled off the stationary white spots so I was left with a black metal board and put an arrow that I cut out of vinyl sticker paper on both sides of the board. Then added the two bullet hole stickers to one side and five to the other side. For the gimmicks, I simply added the stickers to the tops of gimmicks that came with the set and trimmed them around the stickers.
It came out looking pretty good and works great!
Here’s what I don’t like about it: It’s a prop that pretends to be something in real life, but isn’t. Ideally it would look more like this:
However if I used a sign that was more like that, I’m worried that the bullet holes would be harder to see against the text. The simple design that I used makes the bullet holes clearly visible. It was a choice that had to be made, a realistic sign or visibility and I chose visibility.
-Louie
