After being in magic most of my life, I still love it. That’s not to say that I unconditionally love any trick, there are plenty of bad ones. For example I had this one come through my Facebook feed:
For a four ace production it’s pretty bad, and the payoff after all that procedure heavy shuffling doesn’t justify the time it took to get there. After all of that shuffling, at least give me a flash production of the four aces, don’t just take them off the top of the deck.
For a social media video, a better trick would be a couple of riffle shuffles and then a flash production, and you’d be at less than 30 seconds of video and it’d be a much stronger trick. For one minute to simply turn the top cards over, you’d need some novelty or cardistry type shuffling to make it interesting.
With my state finally starting to reopen, I got to do my first in person magic session with a friend of mine! He sent me a text to hop on Skype and I suggested we go to a brewery. Jamming in person is much more fun and productive that over the internet.
The one drawback of meeting up in person is that you don’t have your whole house of supplies to pull from if an idea comes up. For example, let’s say one of us came up with an idea that needed glue, we can talk about the idea, but we can’t try the idea. Over Skype you have more options for things like that.
The BIG advantage of doing a magic jam in person is that you can try things out on people around you. We did some magic for people at tables next to ours. It was from a distance of at least 6 feet, but it worked! People were really into it and I learned a few things I thought were great were just OK.
With the conversion to virtual shows, I’ve been tweaking routines that I already do to make them stronger in a streaming show. I recently wrote about how I’ve switched the loads of my Cee-Lo dice trick from using my pockets, to not going to the pocket at all.
One thing that I noticed was that depending on the angle, my dice cup which was black would sometimes disappear on the black table top. This isn’t desirable, so this morning I recovered it in natural tan leather. This makes the cup more visible and the whole routine easier to watch. An unexpected bonus to this is that the large dice actually appear a smidge bigger next to the tan dice up than the black dice up.
If you’re starting to do some virtual shows, look at your props and see what disappears to the background, then take steps to make it more visible. Changing the color of the outside of a cup was something really simple and took less than 5 minutes to do.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to do a “pass the prop” video to promote a virtual show that I’m in. I’d never really done one before and there were a couple of things I needed to consider. The big one was was that I was quarantining with another act, so we had to decide whether to embrace being in the same place or try to hide that.
We decided to embrace it and you can see what we put out here:
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The show came out a while ago, I had just forgotten about this video until now. The show turned out well and the host really did a great job, hopefully there will be more!
Normally I don’t produce shows, it’s a pain to deal with many acts that aren’t full time pros (and some full time pros as well). During the current “shelter in place” I’m co-producing a variety show that takes place over zoom. There are a lot of approaches to these streaming shows. Our theory is to do them live, and it give it the feeling that anything can happen. Also a live show that is happening while you are watching it has a different energy for the viewer than just watching a youtube video.
Here’s highlights from our last show:
We’re going to a fun, hanging out vibe and I think we’ve gotten that. It’s not just a show it’s a hangout. If you’re doing a streaming show, what separates yours from just a camera on your show?
I’ve been making tricks that I do is to make them more “bullet proof” on camera. One of the things that I’ve done is to use a gimmicked table to avoid going to the pocket to ditch or to steal things. This is changing how I think about a lot of close up magic.
One thing performing for the camera and not live close up is that it’s hard to get your face and table in frame at the same time. That is when you use a traditional table height, which is about weight height. You end up with either a very wide shot and it’s harder to see the action or just the tabletop and your crotch in frame.
Personally I’d rather people see my face open space on the table. In the past I’ve done a couple things, first having a smaller table top that’s slightly higher than normal helped. I also try squat down to physically get my head closer to the table. This is uncomfortable and wouldn’t want to do a whole show this way, but it helps allow me to get my face in the video.
Here’s an example from video of mine:
My daughter invented part of this trick a couple of years ago.She makes me pay a licensing fee to perform the trick!…..#magic #magictrick #cupsandballs #sleightofhand #dicetrick #nocameratricks #magician
You’ll see in the video above that the table is at about belly button level, instead of at the bottom of my crotch. What I’ve recently done is raise my table up to a couple of inches below my armpit and shrink the size of the tabletop. That makes it a lot easier to show both my face and the tabletop!
For me when I perform, I want to have my face in frame as much as possible, that’s just as important as the magic. Sure there are times when you want to focus on the trick, but for me the overwhelming majority of the time, I want my face also in frame. Keep in mind, this is for a static one camera video, when you have a moving or multiple cameras, you have more options to show your face and highlight the magic.
This morning I watched recording of a local magician’s livestream of magic. It was pretty rough to watch, it was almost four minutes into the video before he started doing a trick.
What happened the first four minutes?
He spent that time apologizing for not being able to do a coin trick. Then explaining why he couldn’t do it. Finally he apologized for his livestream being a livestream and not an in person show.
When you perform, you should be performing! Don’t tell me why you can’t do something, or the limitations of the venue (yes, livestream is a venue).
In a live show, would you start by apologizing and having no entertainment for 4 minutes?
Heck no.
Do your opener, once you’ve established yourself, you can mention a limitation as it becomes relevant.
One of the things I’ve never really explored much was using a gimmicked table. The main reason is that it doesn’t really work in the venues that I perform in. I rarely have an audience that’s just in front of me, so the stuff hanging off the back of my table would be visible.
Yesterday I 3d printed a dice holder and it worked great. This was to avoid loading from my pocket. Then it got me thinking that I should remove the “two in the hand, one in the pocket” sequence from the routine so that I don’t got to the pocket at all. That would make the routine more deceptive, so I made a servante to ditch the dice into:
I was playing with a new routine and I’m liking it. I’ve come up with an interesting ditch of the one of the dice, that’s built upon something that I saw Tom Stone do at a lecture. It’s a way to get rid of one of the dice without having to put my hand on the table’s edge. It was part of his talk on “crossing the gaze” and something that’s stuck with me for years.
The new routine is starting to figure itself out, but it’ll be a bit before the sequence starts to get finalized. I’m happy I finally built this.
I’m excited that my table dice holder that I was 3d printing yesterday turned out and works great! It’s for the final two dice production of my Cee-lo cup and dice routine. Here’s the finished holder:
The holder has a notch in the bottom for my finger to contact the bottom of the dice and then to lift straight up to load them into the cup. Here’s this loading procedure in a test video:
This is way better than loading from the pocket for video! I’m glad I spent the time to make it and wasn’t okay with doing it the way I’ve always done it.
One of the tricks I’m adding to my virtual magic shows is Cee-Lo which is my cups and dice routine. One of problems going from an in person show a virtual show is that you can’t move the audience’s focus around as easily. At one point in the routine I need to load the cup and doing it in the room with people there is super easy, however it’s much harder with the focused eye of the camera.
Normally I would load this from my pocket, however that won’t work for the reason above. What I’m going to do is load from the table. I designed a holder for the dice and they will slide up into the cup from behind the table’s edge.
This holder is currently printing out and I’ll try it out later today. This is something that I normally couldn’t use in my live shows because I perform in conditions where people can frequently see behind my table. This is one of the interesting things about working on a virtual show, I can use techniques that don’t work for my in person show.
