Recently I started doing a torn and restored card with a postcard. When I started doing it I was using a old promo postcard that had my picture on it. Right now I’m using the idea of a “staycation” for the theme of the trick, so I had my daughter make me a postcard to use for the trick.
One of the things about this postcard that I learned from watching video of the old promo postcard is that the glossy coating makes it hard to see, it’s just a lot of glare. The current batch of postcards have a matte finish, that solves the glare problem.
The thing with creating tricks is that it’s fixing a lot of small problems really adds up to make the bigger picture better!
Way back in the pre-pandemic days when I had a new Idea I would go to an open mic and try it out. I’m not a huge fan of trying something out at a virtual open mic, as it’s hard to get the overall feeling if the idea is good. In front of a live audience you can get a vibe that there’s something there, even if the trick flops. It’s hard to get that from a virtual show.
A couple days ago I did the Boston Magic Lab to try out the Torn and Restored Postcard I’ve been working on. Here’s the tear and restore sequence:
After rewatching the video, there’s a lot that it needs. One thing it needs a magic moment for the restoration. Something like hitting it with a lighter, but not that as I don’t do fire. Another thing is needs is a good way to ditch the torn postcard.
The nice thing is that I can probably fix both of those. If I reach into my case to grab a lighter, I can ditch the torn postcard. Now that motivates the ditch and gives me the magic moment. I’ll need to find something other than fire.
A possibly solution is using Bizzaro’s Non-Toxic trick which is a vanish of glue. I pour the glue into the folded post card to “fix it”, open it and show the glue is gone and the post card restored. I’m not sure how I feel about mixing two effects at the same time, the vanish of glue and restoration of the card will happen at the same time.
I’ll need to play with it more. I think there’s something there…
The other night I watched Manoj Kaushal’s online show Trapped. A friend recommended it to me, and it’s been generating some buzz with magicians. Here’s the trailer for it:
First I want to say that I bought the cheaper tickets on Stellar Tickets. That means I was just watching the show, not in the Zoom room, so please factor that in during this review.
The best way to describe it is that it’s like an interactive version of one of the Saw Movies. It was live with prerecorded video elements of the “hostages”, etc. Manoj plays the bad guy and the audience has to beat him at a 7 games. Each time we win, a hostage lives and if we lose one game, they all die.
It’s a very interesting premise for a magic / mentalism show, and something were a live stream is the perfect venue for it. I don’t think it would play well in person. Manoj is definitely trying something unique, very different from any online magic / mentalism show I’ve seen.
My biggest dislike was that a lot of the tricks were too magic-y. He does a card trick, and talks about magic. I will say that up front he does mention he’s “a magician…but also has a dark side”. I think the card trick pulls away from the idea of these being games.
Also the odds of the games fluctuate a lot. I think from a statistical stand point the 1 in 52 for the card trick in the middle of the show is the most unlikely to win, then he follows that with something that’s like a 1 in 12. I would have liked to see the odds build get more unlikely as the show progressed.
All of the tricks are good and solid and most rely on a simple principle that’s gained a lot of popularity with the switch to online shows. The way we viewed him on screen did the best and most justified job of using the principle that I’ve seen.
There were a couple of loose ends that didn’t really get tied up, like when someone from the zoom room got kidnapped. I really would have liked for us to play for that person’s life, instead of not really mentioning it again. It’s not just me, in the comments several people asked, “what about john?“.
I paid $15 for the show and for that much, I feel like I got my money’s worth. I also love supporting someone who is trying something different. The show is presented more like an interactive movie than a magic / mentalism show. I’m curious what the general public will think. In the show I watched, I recognized at least half of the people from zoom as magicians. I wonder how many real people are buying tickets?
Whenever a Facebook Live magic show comes through on my feed, I always try to watch them. It’s interesting the variation in people’s set up and what they think looks good, or at least professional.
Here’s a screenshot from a The Virtual Magic show on Zoom that was broadcast to Facebook a few weeks ago:
The problem with this is that the magician kinda thought about his background, but not enough. He’s got one curtain hung, but for $18 more, he could have bought a second one and had a full background.
The other fix is to crop your picture down. An example below is a screenshot of me at a zoom hangout:
The wider shot shows my office around the edges of my screen. I cropped it out of the outgoing video feed. Little things like that make what you’re doing look a lot more professional…or at least not unprofessional.
Tomorrow night I’ll be working on some new material at a virtual magic open mic. This is a free show, but it’s ticketed, so to watch you’ll need to go to:
The Impuzziblities books are great, I’m into my second one and recognize some of the stuff from Jim Steinmeyer‘s other books that I have. It hit me last night why I wouldn’t do most of the material in the books. It’s pretty simple, they are too procedure heavy. Most of the tricks like if you just did the formula you’d get the same results. Jim in beginning of one of the books mentions they are puzzles, so I’m not knocking him or the books for that.
What they tricks in the books need is a physical effect to stick the trick. That takes it out of being a puzzle. Yes, it’s cool when the whole audience has the same card, or is holding up the same hand, but it isn’t an amazing magic trick.
Here’s an example I thought of last night:
There’s a coin trick in one of the Impuzziblities books where you have a row of four coins (dime, penny, nickel and quarter) on the table. Through a bit of procedure a coin is picked. You eliminate one (the quarter) by putting it into your right fist, leaving three coins on the table, one of which is the coin they are thinking of. Then a little bit more procedure and they are thinking of a new coin. You put the remaining coins into your fist with the quarter. You then open your hand and all the coins had disappeared except for the coin they are thinking of, which is the nickel. Your hands are complete empty aside from the nickel.
As far as method for the coins is pretty simple. Use a 21 cent trick coin set and you’ll need to switch the quarter with one of the nickel shells with a Bobo Switch from Modern Coin Magic. You do the switch very early on in the trick , you have a ton of time to ditch the quarter. You will need to tweak the trick a little bit from how Steinmeyer wrote it to force the nickel instead of the penny. Or you could do it as written and end with a dime and penny set, using a click pass get rid of the nickel and quarter.
I think adding the physical trick to the verbal instructions moves the trick a bit more from the puzzle side to the magic side.
Yesterday we handmade a progressive anagram from five words. If you didn’t read yesterdays post, go and read it, or this won’t make a lot of sense. One thing I didn’t like was that the first YES or NO question have a 60% chance of getting “No” answer. Using the same method to make the progressive anagram, by eliminating the vowels first, but this time examining the vowels, we’ll get a better sequence.
here are the words:
Beer Agreement Heat Bowel Touch
I noticed that all of them have an E except for one word. If we eliminate the E first, we’ll get an 80% chance of a YES. If we get a NO, we immediately know the word. This is way better than yesterday’s layout. Here’s what today’s flowcart for the same words looks like:
E ————–> Touch | Beer, Agreement, Heat, Bowel
I’m going to eliminate another vowel, I’ll do A, as the only other vowel that’s used in the words is O, and that’s only in one word, which would give me a 75% chance of getting a NO answer. The A will give me a 50/50 chance.
At this point we have two pairs of words, so we just need to find a letter that’s only in one word of each pair.
While essentially the same as the progressive anagram from yesterday, this one is slightly better as the odds of getting a YES on the first letter are better and if you get a NO on the first letter you immediately know the word, which is a huge advantage. Also there’s only one word where you’ll would get two NO answers, where in yesterday’s flowchart there were two instances.
Now let’s compare this to the what a computer will come up with. I plugged the same words into a progressive anagram generator and here’s what is spit out:
Essentially the computer came up with the same solution as I did today. the difference was we chose different letters for splitting the last two pairs, but that’s arbitrary. The nice thing about the computer is that it did it in one try, and in about 1 second. Knowing to do it yourself is a solid back up and you understand the process a bit more.
With moving to virtual magic shows, I’ve been playing a lot with progressive anagrams. If you’re not sure what a progressive anagram is, the basic effect is someone is thinking of a word. You then ask if a several letters are in it and based on their “yes” or “no” answers you can determine the word. Essentially it is a flowchart that uses a process of elimination from a list of words. The flow chart and based on YES or NO answers to whether the word has a letter you will either move down the list or to the right.
If you get a YES, you move down. If you get a NO, you move to the right
That’s it.
Normally I use an online progressive anagram generator to create these flowcharts. For fun, I thought I’d try to figure out how to create them myself. Since I use them a lot, I’ve noticed a few things that are the basis of how I do mine. I’m going to hand make a progressive anagram.
The first thing we need is a list of words. I used an online random word generator and using 5 words. The words it gave me are:
Beer Agreement Heat Bowel Touch
I’m going to start by eliminating vowels, so I’ll start with the A.
Currently my flow chart looks like:
A -> Beer, Bowel, Touch | Agreement, Heat
Remember if they say YES you move down and if they say NO, you move to the right.
I’m not the biggest fan of having a 60% odds of getting a “no” answer on my first question. For the sake of simplicity to explain the easiest way I’ve found to do this, we’ll keep going with the A.
For the next question, if we will eliminate the E, so the flowchart will look like this:
Now we have two sections, each with two words we need to figure out. It’s a simple matter to figure out a letter that’s only in one of the Beer/Bowel pair or in the other set of two words. We’ll start with the Beer/Bowel. Let’s eliminate the O, and the flow chart will look like:
Then we’ll find the letter that’s only in of the Agreement/Heat pair. That letter is H, so here’s the final Flowchart:
And there you have it, we hand build a progressive anagram.
In May I started worked on a trick that was my version of Albert Goshman’s Cards Thru Newspaper. You can search for those blog posts, but it shows how the trick progressed from the original Goshman trick to what I’d now consider an original magic trick/routine.
Essentially the original trick is that four cards appear one at a time and reappear under a folded up piece of newspaper. I took out what I didn’t like, the cards and newspaper and ended up using an envelope and four polaroid pictures. The pictures disappear and reappear under the newspaper.
It’s been five months since I started working on it, and really, it should have progressed further, it’s been slow going, mostly because of laziness on my part and not putting in as much work on it as I should be. I’ve been doing it as “preshow” for some virtual shows, but really I should be out at virtual open mics doing it and working it in.
I did recently make a change. I’ve been using this trick in pre-recorded virtual shows lately and a problem the trick had was the problems is that the Polaroid pictures are soo glossy, that they are hard to see on camera. They reflect too much light, and you can’t see them clearly. I took some brochure paper and printed the Polaroid pictures onto that paper. It’s a semi-gloss paper, so while it’s shiny, it doesn’t reflect nearly as much as the actual Polaroid picture.
The row on the left are the real Polaroids and the right are the copies. When they are side by side you can see the copies are a little less vibrant than the originals. However without a side by side comparison, you really can’t tell.
Keep working on your magic, even if you’ve been doing a trick for years and it’s a polished routine. There’s usually still improvements that can be made. Sometimes these are small improvements that no one will really notice, but these little things add up!
The last couple of days I’ve written about the torn and restored card that I’m working on. Now that I have the technical end pretty much worked out, the next step is figuring out how to make it work in a show. Right now with virtual shows, it’s easy because I can hold it close to the camera. Once “socially distant” shows are more common, I’ll need to make it bigger than just a playing card.
The original version that Harry Anderson did used a card that was bigger than a jumbo card. Yesterday I made a gimmicked card using a jumbo deck and while it’s visible, the way the current jumbo cards are made, they are too hard to make to be practical for use in every show. That got me thinking about the Phoenix Parlour Decks. These are between a standard deck and a jumbo deck. Being slightly better is a huge advantage for visibility.
While I’d love to be able to do the gimmicked cards in jumbo size, the availability of the old stock jumbo bicycle cards makes this something that would have a limited life. Ideally when I create, whatever I use will still be in production, so I can at least stock up on them.
