One thing that I really dislike doing are prerecorded virtual shows. I do my best to avoid them, or talk the person into having my segment live. A prerecord is soo much more work than doing it live. It’s more than just turning the camera on and going for 15 mins. There’s editing, rendering and uploading that needs to happen. I don’t think a lot of people thing about that.
If you’re doing prerecorded shows and not editing, you aren’t taking advantage of the format. You can crop in for tighter shots, or add things that aren’t as easy to do in a live format.
I’m working on a 15 minute prerecorded spot for a variety show and will probably spend 3-4 hours on it. If I did it live, I’d spend about a hour total. Also the live element makes a magic show much more fun to watch for the audience and for me to perform.
Work in Progress…
One of the current projects that I’m working on is a video from my kitchen. It’s a magical video, and I needed to do a trick with a lime. I had written up a bunch of ideas like:
- Lime that moves out of the way when I try to cut it
- Lime that cuts itself
- Bouncing lime
- Finding something needed later inside the lime
While driving to the store to buy some limes, I hit upon this idea:
That’s just a quick snipped taken out of context, but it’s a lemon that turns into a lime. I originally read this in a book years ago that turned a red apple into a green apple as you ate it. I think the method works better with a lemon / lime due to the texture. Also, in theory it’s changing to a different fruit, not just changing color which may make it a better trick from an effect standpoint.
Ultimately the video above didn’t make it into the final project, an expanded version of the trick did that used two lemons and two limes. I’ll probably post it in the future, once it’s used by the group I’m creating it for.
Flea Circus Book!
There was a fun surprise waiting for me in my email this morning. A while ago Xavi Puk contacted me asking to use a couple of pictures of my flea circus for an upcoming book about flea circuses. Well, it looks like the Spanish Edition it out and available on Amazon.com !
Unfortunately I don’t read Spanish, so I’ll have to wait for the English version to happen. I did run the pages that I’m mention in through Google Translate and I’m used as an example in marketing your flea circus. Specifically how I embrace social media and how I pose / stage pictures.
If you’re into flea circuses and can read spanish, you should check it out. It appears to be a pretty thorough book!
Character Building…
A couple of nights ago my local magic club hosted a lecture by Fred Blanco (Wildcat Jackson) who talked about character development. I’d seen this lecture before at another magic club and when I had the chance to bring him in to the Emerald City Wizards magic club, I took him up on it.
What I like about Fred’s talk is that he breaks character down pretty well. It’s a something you don’t need a theater degree to understand. He does a great job of teaching beginner level character, that’s accessible to everyone.
It was a fun night, and Fred also has a ton of cool props!!!
Chicago Magic Lounge
Last week I ended up with a ticket to the Chicago Magic Lounge’s Virtual Happy Hour. I’ve never been in person to the venue, and on video it looks like a cool place. I think tickets are $15 and we had four magicians, a mixologist and a host. All of the performers were performing live at the venue except for one that was in another country.
I didn’t get a picture of the host Benjamin Barnes, however he did a great job introducing the acts. Personally, I would have liked to see him do a set in there somewhere.
All of the acts used audience participation, with the helper on screen. They were in engaging, and the audience was fairly active in the chat.
One interesting thing that happened during the show was at one point when someone was picked to help out onscreen the guy said something like, “I thought this was all fake…“. What he meant was that he thought everyone helping was a stooge.
That comment raises an interesting question:
Do most audience members think these shows use stooges?
I don’t know if there’s a way to keep people from thinking that. People have the same thought at in person shows, so it’s not unique to a zoom show. This is more of a concern for a ticketed show than it is for a corporate zoom show.
Back to the Chicago Magic Lounge, for $15 it’s a solid show and worth checking out online. I think the overall run time was about 2 hours.
Doing the Interactive Coin Vanish
Recently I was a guest on a web show, and I do (and teach) the Interactive Coin Trick which has been named The Other Seven Cent Trick. Here’s the interview with Jamie Matchett:
I’m going to write this up for Vanish Magazine in the near future. That will have all the instructions in a more digestible order.
Putting It All Together…
This week I’ve written about putting together and interactive coin trick. Today, we’re putting it all together the force and the coin gimmicks. Here’s an example of what the trick could look like:
I like how the vanish at the end gives the trick a feeling of closure. It also builds off of the mini effect of knowing they picked the dime.
This is my first attempt at creating an interactive virtual magic trick from scratch. I think I did alright.
12 Cent Interactive Trick!
The last couple of days I’ve been writing about doing an interactive “do as I do” trick using coins that has a magical ending. Yesterday I talked about how I’m forcing the coin, and a couple days ago I talked broadly about how the coin vanish would happen.
Basically I’m using a 21 cent trick coin set…but instead of the dime that’s in the set I’m using a penny. That gives me a set of two pennies and two nickels that will nest to form a single nickel. You are essentially doing the standard routine used with tricks like the 21 cent trick, all the coins go into your hand, you remove a nickel (that has the other three coins inside of it), then open your hand to show the other three coins are gone.
What my forcing sequence gives is a mini effect before the main effect. More importantly is that the mini effect justifies removing the nickel from your hand, which shifts a lot of heat from the method of the trick AND removes heat from the coin on the table, since there was a reason to remove it.
What I love about working on this trick is that I’ve taken a trick (21 Cent trick), where the standard routine is garbage and made something decent out of it. I can only think of one other routine with the coin set that’s any good. It’s in one of John Mendoza‘s books and uses ae $1.35 coin set, which is essentially the same coin set. That routine ends with a very surprising production of 85 pennies!!!
Interactive Coin Force…
Yesterday I wrote about working on an interactive coin trick (read it here). This is the style of trick where the person (or group) follows your instructions and you predict where they end. My version has a physical trick kicker that ends with a vanish of all the coins that the audience isn’t holding.
Today I’m going to talk about the procedure that I’m using to force the coins. I came up with my own force sequence for this routine. If you’ve just read Jim Steinmeyer’s Impuzziblities books, they don’t really teach you how to create your own sequence. That’s OK as that’s not the purpose of those books.
The book Body Mentalism by Juan Pablo Ibanez really does a good job of laying out principle that will allow you to create your own sequences. Right now with these “do as I do” interactive style tricks being very popular, I really recommend you get the book to understand the principle. I think knowing why the forces work is good knowledge to have in your head…even if you don’t intend on creating your own sequences.
Okay, let’s get to the sequence I came up with for the trick. You lay out four coins in a row, two pennies and two nickels. They are in this order:
Penny – Nickel – Penny – Nickel
You have them touch any coin, then explain the “rules”. These are you will give them two things to spell, and they move one coin per letter. The first thing they spell is the name of the coin they are not touching. If they are touching a penny, they will spell N-I-C-K-E-L and if they are touching a nickel they will spell P-E-N-N-Y.
Now you have them spell the name of the coin that they are now touching. For example, if they are now touching the penny, they spell P-E-N-N-Y. The coin they are touching is now their new selected coin.
If they followed your instructions they will now be touching a nickel.
This sequence by itself isn’t very strong, but when you add the vanish of all the other coins, it becomes a pretty decent trick.
Interactive Coin Vanish…
One of the things that’s huge in magic right now are the tricks where the spectators at home follow along with what you do and you end up knowing what they are thinking of. I wrote about my thoughts on this recently, and you can read that blog post here. Basically I want to use add magic to the puzzle to make it more magical.
After the blog post, I wanted to come up with an original trick, with an original puzzle. The trick was going to use coins, so I went out a bought a 21 Cent Trick and a $1.35 Trick at my local magic shop. With these two sets added to the array of trick coins I already had at home, it would allow me a lot of options for the routine.
The premise I was going with was a coin would be selected and all of the coins would disappear. The problem I was having was with the sequence of the counting. There was too much of it.
I finally settled on using two pairs of coins, two pennies and two nickels. In the end they pick a nickel, and the other three coins disappear and there’s just a nickel left.