In yesterdays post I showed a gimmick that I was making for a video. This video was made because my brother said I should do a cooking show for our weekly “virtual dinners”. A night before our dinner, I had a ton of ideas and wrote out a rough script, and sent it to a buddy of mine who punched it up. I then built the gimmicks and recorded the show.
Here’s what I made:
At about the 9 min mark you can see the gimmick I posted about yesterday. There’s a couple of other interesting magic effects that happen in the video as well. This was what I found interesting about making the whole video was that the cooking was a frame for magic to happen. It was a built in presentation hook.
It took over 12 hours to make this video, and the sole goal of it was to make my brothers laugh. That’s art, money or longevity of it wasn’t a consideration, it was simply to get a reaction. What reaction are the videos your are posting designed to get?
If you’ve seen my magic lecture you’ve heard my favorite quote, which is essentially what my lecture is about. If you haven’t, here’s the quote:
Go past crowd pleasing and into real comedy…
Mel Brooks
He says it on Tom Papa’s podcast, it’s a great interview and you should listen to it. In my lecture I use the quote not just for comedy, but for magic. Sponge balls are crowd pleasing, how do you go past that and get into real magic?
Let’s get back to what I’m writing this post about. Someone in a magic forum had posted a picture of the nest of wands comedy prop that was broken.
If you’re not familiar with the Nesting Wands trick you have large diameter wand and smaller wands keep coming out of it. If you’re not familiar with the prop, here’s it in action:
The sets that are common in the USA have one end that’s sealed, and the person who wrote the Facebook post thought that they were broken and need to be fixed. For me whenever a prop breaks, I look at it as a chance to p lay with the prop and figure out things that may not have been possible before. I’ve had a bunch of cool things come out of props breaking and getting a new view of them.
When I was younger and did magic shows at kids birthday parties, I used this prop. However the set I had were made by Tops Magic in Europe. Most people in the USA didn’t like this set of Nesting Wands because they were open at both ends. I loved them because there was a lot more you could do with them. Here’s some ideas:
When the kid tries to “one up you” and restack them, they will fall out the other end.
You renest them and they all fall onto the floor.
You renest them and they slide out the other end and land in your case, but you don’t notice that. Then once they are all in your case, you look at the wand in your hand and see it’s empty. You then look around for where they went.
When the kid hands them back to you, you drop them all over the floor. You pick up the biggest wand and ask the kid to hand you another wand. They do, you put it into the wand in your hand and it just falls out the bottom ( you don’t notice that) and have the kid keep handing you wands and they keep falling through. Repeat till it’s not funny and at that point start holding the wands in with your finger at the bottom. Once they are all nested, let them drop out and onto the floor!
Look a prop breaking as an opportunity to do something creative and new with the prop. Sometimes you’ll just have a broken prop…other times you’ll have gold!
One of the worst reasons to keep trying to do a trick is because you are in love with the method. I’ve got a trick in my show that I love the method more than the audience loves the trick. I think the trick has something going for it, it’s just a matter of figuring out what that is.
The reason that I’m still trying to make Silk Thru Coathanger work:
I’ve written about this trick a lot on this blog, and it’s still a work in progress. If I was rating my routine for it, I’d give it the grade of C. However a while ago I added a move, took out a move and rearranged the sequence. Those changes moved it up from a D to a C. I’d be really happy if I could get it up to a B.
Recently I did some workshopped it with some other performers and we came up with some ideas for how to frame it. We’ll see how those play…
Right now we’ve all found ourselves with a lot of extra time. I’ve been using mine to try to catch my “Great White Whale” of tricks I’ve always wanted to create. This trick has been in my head for over a decade and a lot of things had to come together to for it to happen.
Here’s the trick, and be sure to watch the whole thing:
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of using a nested replicas of the main prop as a final load ever since I read Gary Oullett’s cups and balls routine in his Fulminations column in Genii magazine. Then about 10 or 15 years ago I thought about applying it to the shell game. The hurdle was getting shells to nest and enough of them.
Then the breakthrough came when I got a 3D printer. I could print the shells, however the problem was they didn’t look like shells. They looked like plastic things that kinda looked like walnut shells. A friend of mine sent me a link of how to make molds and I tried to learn off of youtube videos with limited success. I ended up taking a 4 hour class on making molds and resin casting that really helped speed up the learning curve.
I kept making baby steps to get towards the end result and finally got there. I’m not done yet, ideally in the future I’ll have some shells that look a little bit better, but for now I have a workable version of the trick!
When someone puts out a magic trick, there are two ways the creator does it. One is how they do it and the other is a dumbed down version for people who don’t want to practice. Personally when I put out a product, I put out what I actually do and use (at the time of putting it out). That way it’s a release that I know inside and out.
A great trick that came out a few years ago, but has mixed reviews is called Split.
The effect is you have a twenty dollar bill and it visually rips into two ten dollar bills. This is a great trick, but the main complaint I saw was the gimmick was obvious. The problem that people weren’t able to see past was that it was designed to be done with non-US currency. The money in other countries is more colorful and the designs hide the gimmick better.
For me it took about a minute of looking at the gimmick to solve the problem. Here’s my gimmick:
Basically I moved the gimmick from the middle of the bill to the edges. There’s a lot more printing to hide it on a US bill.
Then there was a corner of the old bill that was slightly visible when I was doing mirror practice. I covered it with the corner of a bill that matched what it should be. This was a small thing that really wasn’t an issue, it just sorta bugged me.
When you get a trick and you think it doesn’t work, before you write a bad review, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Was the trick designed with European money, or created by someone that’s left handed, or whatever. You many not work exactly as the creator, and you need to be able to adjust.
With the west coast of the United States on lockdown and practicing “social isolation“, I’ve been playing with some ideas. I’ve always wanted to do a coin thru glove like the Lubor Fielder trick where you push a coin through a sheet of latex. When I’ve tried it with a latex glove it never worked … Continue reading “Coin Thru Glove!”
With the west coast of the United States on lockdown and practicing “social isolation“, I’ve been playing with some ideas. I’ve always wanted to do a coin thru glove like the Lubor Fielder trick where you push a coin through a sheet of latex. When I’ve tried it with a latex glove it never worked out right.
One of the things that people are doing when they aren’t at home is wearing latex gloves, and I sat down to solve the problem of putting a coin through them. Here’s what I came up with:
As far as method goes, it’s very different from Lubor’s trick, however it’s a bit more practical to do and repeat…but the angles are worse. I’m glad I came up with a solution, so whenever I look at latex gloves, I don’t think of how to put a coin through them.
With the lack of live performance venues performers have been doing their thing with streaming video on the internet. Most of it is a person in front of a camera with no production value. Yesterday was St. Patrick’s day and The Dropkick Murphy’s live streamed a show that would normally have an audience and it … Continue reading “Practice!”
With the lack of live performance venues performers have been doing their thing with streaming video on the internet. Most of it is a person in front of a camera with no production value. Yesterday was St. Patrick’s day and The Dropkick Murphy’s live streamed a show that would normally have an audience and it was amazing.
You can watch it here:
Besides really setting the bar for a live streamed show, they also were a lesson in how to perform. You should be able to perform like it’s a stadium for no one. I know it’s strange when you don’t get the feedback from the audience, however they way they performed it was as if to a full house. It’s clear that when the rehearse, they rehearse like they are playing to a crowd. They way the pause after a song, they’ve been there and planned to be there.
Look at how you practice, are you simply going through the motions or are you doing it like you’re actually doing a show?
On Friday of last week I pitched in and helped out at Market Magic Shop in Seattle for a couple of hours. A couple of magicians came out and we jammed a bit, it was a lot of fun! One of the things that we were goofing off with was pressed pennies. Here’s a trick … Continue reading “Magic Shop Jam!”
On Friday of last week I pitched in and helped out at Market Magic Shop in Seattle for a couple of hours. A couple of magicians came out and we jammed a bit, it was a lot of fun!
One of the things that we were goofing off with was pressed pennies. Here’s a trick with one:
It’d be an amazing giveaway if you had your own custom penny made, or better yet a quarter and did the trick and gave them away. The initial cost would be crazy, but would be a giveaway that they’d keep!
A couple of months ago I recorded my Coin in Chapstick magic trick and haven’t looked at it. I’m glad I finally did, the trick looks great! My only problem with it is that it doesn’t really have a place in my show. I did a blog post about it awhile ago about how just … Continue reading “Lip Bomb!”
A couple of months ago I recorded my Coin in Chapstick magic trick and haven’t looked at it. I’m glad I finally did, the trick looks great! My only problem with it is that it doesn’t really have a place in my show. I did a blog post about it awhile ago about how just because it’s an everyday object doesn’t mean it’s right for your show.
You can watch my trick here:
The trick would be better suited as a “street magic” type video than it would in formal show. I’ll probably write it up and publish it in Vanish Magazine.
There’s a classic beginner’s card trick where a card is selected and returned to the deck. You then drop the deck onto the table and their card appears on top of the deck. The working is simple, you control the card to the top of the deck, sidejog it and drop the deck onto the … Continue reading “Try Another Way”
There’s a classic beginner’s card trick where a card is selected and returned to the deck. You then drop the deck onto the table and their card appears on top of the deck. The working is simple, you control the card to the top of the deck, sidejog it and drop the deck onto the table from about a foot up. The air hitting the sidejogged card will flip it over as it falls. It’s a great trick.
My problem with the trick is that I’ve never had more than about a 50% success rate with it. I’m not sure what I’m doing right or wrong. The other day I was killing time between shows and figured out a way to get a 100% success rate with the trick.
Here’s what I came up with:
Doing the trick this way is a lot harder, but works every time. What I’m doing is a one handed top palm as the cards are dropped to the table. The palm is something I could already do, so adding it to the trick was no big deal. If I didn’t already do the palm, I probably wouldn’t learn it for this trick…however I would recommend learning that and I consider it something every magician who does card tricks should be able to do.
If you’ve got a trick that doesn’t work (technically) for you, start to explore other ways to do the trick. I’m pretty sure someone has to have come up with my solution to the flip over card trick before, however it solved a problem for me.
