Video – Page 34 – MagicShow.Tips

Ball Trick…

One trick that I keep going back to over the years is the Three Ball Trick. It’s a great trick, and personally I really like the idea of these older tricks that are known, but not used as much as something like coins across, or linking rings. The slightly less common ground is good for … Continue reading “Ball Trick…”

There are a lot of variations of this, so it could be a “balls across” or “two in the hand, one in the pocket” type routine. Most routines end with everything vanishing. This for roving magic is good, it signals the end of the routine and doesn’t take up much pocket space. Some routines end with a production of a large item.

The version of this trick I’ve been playing with this week isn’t a close up trick, but for cabaret sized audiences. Unlike most versions of the trick that use a net held by two spectators to catch the balls, my version is just me onstage and no table.

Here’s the routine. Three balls go into the left fist, and one at a time they invisibly travel to the right hand. One is put into my pocket, then it travells back to my hand. All three are put into my pocket and three balls reappear in my hand, but these are large balls!

There’s not much to the routine, aside from the production of three large balls, where most routines only have a single production. I think Fernando Koeps has a routine with multiple large balls appearing. For me the fun of putting together a routine is having something unique, whether in method, or sequence. While I hate to call myself an artist, but that’s the artist in my that doesn’t really want to do someone else’s version of a trick.

Sketch Money…

Right now I’m on the road performing in Alaska and I tend to practice more when I travel than when at home. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one is that I think I just have less distractions. All of the things that I can use to put off practicing at … Continue reading “Sketch Money…”

For my summer show I needed a way to produce a dollar bill and I remember seeing a review of this trick. This is follow up to the trick Sketch, which was a similar production of a card. The one with the dollar bill was also very poorly reviewed, where the card got good reviews.

I think the main reason for the difference in reviews was that the card one was better for close up where the dollar one has a problem, that can really only be solved by distance between you and the audience. I think most of the people that bought it were looking for a close up trick and that’s the why no one liked it.

The solution on the instructional video was for you to simply step back 6 feet from the audience. That’s a horrible solution to the problem, as it’s strange if you are table hopping and doing stuff under the audience’s noses, then step back two meters. This is a platform trick, not a close up.

I did some reworking of the gimmick to make it slimmer, and I’ve got some ideas to improve it even more, however they were beyond what I could make in a hotel room. The gimmick supplied could be made better, however I understand why it is the way it is. It’s got to be made to hit a price point, and make it reasonably easy for the average person to be able to make.

This is where being willing to rebuild something you paid for is a good trait. You can take something and make it better than the mass market version. Your custom version will be better 99% of the time!

Promotional Tricks…

Every now and then I get asked by bookers if I can make a promotional video for their event. Usually it’s me saying hi and doing a quick trick. This works fine, however I’m playing with doing slightly more informational promo tricks. Here’s one I did the other day: It’s decent, it has a little … Continue reading “Promotional Tricks…”

It’s decent, it has a little bit of a surprise and has all of the information. The next one I do, I think it’ll have a trick and have the information text cards as a kicker to it. Maybe something like a four ace production, then the text cards.

I think getting requests for promotional videos specific to an event are going to be more common in the future with pretty much every public event doing promo on social media. I think having a generic sequence you do, but having custom information cards would be the best way to do it.

When I’m planning on attending local magicians shows I frequently ask them if they’d like me to record their show for them. One response I get a lot is, “I don’t like to watch myself on video”. This response surprises me, especially now when so much of the live entertainment industry is video related with social media, etc.

I always wonder why people don’t like watching their shows on video? Is it because they aren’t proud of it? I think this probably the reason. It’s hard to watch your show early on when you aren’t good. You’ll notice everything that’s wrong or that you don’t like. This is where you grow, by watching those things and eliminating them so your show is watchable by you. If you can’t stand to watch your show, how do you expect your audience to watch it?

With video being so cheap and easy to get compared to when I started, it’s really a wonder why people are opposed to getting video and watching it. Personally I think good video is worth it’s weight in gold. Whether it’s for use in a promo video, a social media clip, or to improve your show.

Go out there are record your shows…but more importantly, watch the video!

No Bad Ideas…

One of the things I try to do is act on most of my ideas. No matter how bad, impractical, or not my style it is. Just working them out is a good exercise for my brain. Most of these ideas will never make it into my show. Here’s an idea I’ve had in my … Continue reading “No Bad Ideas…”

Here’s an idea I’ve had in my head for a little while:

I’ve come up with several methods for it, all of which are very impractical. This one is probably the most usable version of the trick.

The downfall is that the trick isn’t how unpractical the method is, it’s that it’s a small trick. Visually it’s hard to see, and it’s got a very specific spot in a show that at can be. This trick has to be the opening of a card set, or when you introduce an additional deck of cards into a card set.

I’m glad I worked through the methods and got to work out my creativity muscles.

The Shrinking Card…

When I was a teenager there was a trick that came out called Diminishing Returns by Mike Powers. This is a great trick where someone picks a card and the whole deck shrinks except for their card. Then the whole deck grows and their card shrinks. For the finale their card visually grows back to … Continue reading “The Shrinking Card…”

It’s a great trick and I did it for quite a while. Recently I was messing around with some cards and ended up playing with a similar gaff and here’s what I came up with:

This is a fun little sequence for the shrinking of a card. There’s not much to it, and I might write it up for Vanish Magazine in the future.

Make it Bigger!

One thing I’m trying to do is make things play larger, so it’s easier to see them from the back of the theater. I think this is something that’s really overlooked by many magicians. Sometimes you can’t make something larger, like when you are doing Miser’s dream, the coins size will max out to a point when they are no longer believable as a coin.

One trick that I love is the Coin in Bottle, however it does play fairly small. The nice thing is that the trick has an audio component to it. The audience can hear it rattling around inside the bottle. I really liked the idea of creating an impossible object that I could give away. My idea was to do a tennis ball in bottle:

The use of the topit worked great in a live setting, but not so well in a video. The other method I used a sponge tennis ball that I had cut in half and hallowed out. I would just smash the bottle onto it, collapsing it under the bottle as the other real tennis ball popped into view. Both methods had advantages and disadvantages.

I no longer do this trick in the show as I’m lazy and putting the tennis balls into the bottles was a pain in the butt and not worth the pay off. For me the thing is to keep thinking bigger and actually trying to make it play bigger!

Not So Close Up…

The tend in magic is the choreographed sleight of hand to music, like what Shin Lim did on America’s Got Talent. It’s style that’s been around for a long time, it’s just popular right now. I think of it as something that was a “magic convention act” in the past, and now is a mainstream act.

A couple of nights ago I was lucky enough to see Shawn Farquhar do his “shape of my heart” card routine at a show. It was really great. It hit all the musical beats, it had good visual magic, and overall it’s a great routine.

This kinda proves the theory that I’ve written about before that this style of close up when put on camera is the new stage manipulation act. I think audiences are getting better with watching a live show on a screen. Personally I’d rather watch it without the screen, however to the general public this is an acceptable way to view a show.

Over the last few months I’ve started to think about what I could do for this style of performing. It’s really not what I do, so I don’t know if I’ll ever come up with anything.

Work It Out…

One of the things I do when I buy a magic book, is that I try to work through everything that’s reasonable to work through. What I mean by that is that I I’m not going to build an illusion if it’s in the book, but I will build simpler project. I try work through every trick that doesn’t require a crazy gimmick I don’t have.

I think this makes me a better magic creator and performer. It allows me to improvise much better as I’ve already done something a few times, it makes it easier to recreate when the moment occurs. It also makes you look at props differently.

When I travel, I try to make little videos of magic tricks with things found in my hotel room, or in today’s case my state room as I’m performing on a cruise ship this week. This morning when I was brushing my teeth, I noticed the cups in the bathroom were big enough to hold a deck of cards. That then led me to thinking about the trick Everywhere and Nowhere by Hofzinser that uses a glass to isolate a deck of cards. That led me to wondering if a “flap card” would work in a glass. Turns out a flap card works great in a glass, and I like the isolation that the glass adds to the change of the card.

Now it’s got me thinking about how I can use this in a show. In a cabaret show, or a stage show where you have video projection, it would be a great reveal for a tossed out deck. You start with one card in glass as your prediction. The three cards are selected and the prediction changes to three different cards. If they saw their card they sit down. This moves the flap card from essentially a close up trick to something bigger.

Maybe I’ll start to write a tossed out deck routine using the flap card as the premise/ending.

One of the tricks I’ve always loved is the Haunted Deck. It’s an amazing trick, the first one I ever bought as a kid was horrible, half the deck was gimmicked, and you were attached to it, so it wasn’t the most practical version of the trick. It worked, but it could be better.

This is where innovating comes through, there’s are better ways to do the Haunted Deck, and it’s a good thing we didn’t stop at the version I bought as a kid. A similar version is the one popularized by Eugene Burger, which while similar in method, allowed you to use the deck after the trick. This is a huge leap in the method.

Then you have a version using Loops, which allows you to use a borrowed deck, but can be unreliable as the gimmick is fragile. A few years ago I discovered Haunted 2.0, which fit the bill for me. 100% reliable, allowed me to use the deck before and after the trick, it’s great and the version of the trick that I do. However last week at a magic session a friend of mine showed me an impromptu version. It’s at about the 37 second mark of this video:

I think this version looks amazing and the only reason I haven’t switched to it is that in Haunted 2.0 you don’t have to touch the deck, which is one of the strong points of that version.

If we stopped innovating with “good enough” the Haunted Deck would be a trick that I wouldn’t be doing now. So go out there and make good tricks better!