Doing a national news spot can be very challenging when doing magic. A while ago, I wrote a post about doing them with some behind the scenes video. One of the biggest challenges is how fluid they can be. With magic, it’s fairly easy to be prepared with a couple of tricks that run different lengths of time.
Recently I did a national news spot at a gig where I was doing my street organ. This is a bit more challenging for a news spot. I was told we’d have 30 seconds, so the reporter, producer and I planned the bit and here’s how it came out:
Unforeseen Challenges of Performing on Live Television!
Those 30 seconds ended up being over a minute! I was rushing because I thought we didn’t have much time. I was also getting a weird vibe from the reporter and wasn’t sure what to make of it. In my past experience, the weird vibe means we have to wrap up. After we finished, he mentioned he lost the audio in his earpiece, so he didn’t know how we were doing on time. We both were kinda flying blind!
Given the situation it turned out well.
-Louie