Honestly, it’s a trick that’s theming didn’t age well and the trick isn’t that good of a trick without the punchline at the end…which isn’t a great punchline by today’s standards.
This week I sold off the last couple of pieces of virtual show equipment that I had. I’ve slowly been getting rid of stuff, like my foot pedals, and I finally sold my ATEM mini and my Stream Deck. Those two things were the two pieces of hardware that really made doing virtual shows easy (from a production standpoint). If I ever need them again, I can buy them, but I haven’t touched them in a year and I used them two times in the year before that.
I can still do live virtual shows, it’s just that the level of production won’t be what it was in 2021. Recently I gave a presentation to the Kids Entertainer Academy and the only piece of tech that I used was my projector to put my notes on the wall.
Virtual shows can still be done with just OBS running on my laptop and have a level of production, so if anyone wanted one, I could still do it.
One thing that still amazes me is how often magicians complain about people stealing from each other but they don’t take the most basic steps to protect their ideas. The myth is that you can’t legally protect a magic trick, but the reality is that you can. It’s through a patent, the problem with patenting magic is that it’s an expensive and time consuming process.
There have been some very successful magicians who have patented magic tricks. Yigal Mesika patents a lot of his stuff and of course the D’lite is a good example of a magic trick that was very successful where a patent helped protect it.
I personally use copyrights to protect my instruction sheets, art and ad copy. So I’m able to remove people that are pirating those. Then I use a trademark to protect my name, so that even if someone changes my ad copy, they can’t use my name. I have started to trademark the names of my shows, this makes it harder for people to steal the concept of my that particular show.
The challenge with trademarks is that they still take time. The current one I’m working on has been in the system for over a year and hopefully will be approved soon as I just got the notification of publication for it. That means is passed all of the internal USPTO objections and now it just needs to be put out in the monthly publication for normal people to object to it.
If you’re worried about having your ideas stolen, check out copyright.gov and USPTO.gov, they will give you a lot of information about the differences in IP and the processes.
Years ago when I wanted to become a more “national” act, one of the things that I did was try to do something nationally newsworthy to send to agents twice a year. Twice a year turned into doing it quarterly and then monthly.
What exactly the definition of “nationally newsworthy” is, I’m not sure. Roughly it’s things that I can tell agents about and it raises my status from local Seattle magician to something bigger.
That’s where doing things like writing an article for a mainstream magazine comes in. It’s makes me an “expert” on magic, not just a local magician. Do things like this make the quality of my show better?
Nope.
Things like this raise the perception of the quality of my show. For getting work from a new agent or work at another level that’s something important!
About 6 months ago I was approached by Sorbet Magazine to write a little essay about the suspension of disbelief and how it applies to magicians. The article was based on a blog post that I had made here a long time ago that one of the editors had found. I rewrote and expanded it to fit what they wanted and it just got published in their magazine!
To be 100% honest, when I was contacted by the magazine, it felt like a scam…who would pay me to write a mainstream magazine article?! I did it anyway as if it was a scam, at least I would have practiced writing for someone else and hitting a word count with a non-magician target audience.
When I was finishing up the article, I was sharing an AirBnB with Dennis Forel and he helped me tweak my 5th grade, public school writing style into something a bit more grown up.
The magic show that I do for summer camps and libraries changes and material cycles in and out. I try to cycle material out and back in about every three years, especially for things that are memorable. One of those things is my Snake Wand Surprise. It’s something the kids remember, and doing it every year would lessen it’s impact. If the kids are anticipating the ending, it’s not as much fun.
Here’s what the routine looks like:
I’m making a batch of them right now so that I have ones for my show and some in stock for sale. One of the things that I do with my personal set is make three sets of “double snakes”. I take two snakes and sew them together and do this with a total of six snakes, giving me three snakes that are double long.
This makes clean up slightly faster as there are only 11 individual snakes to pick up instead of 14. I can repack the fourteen snakes into the wand in less than 2 minutes, so the time saving is negligible. It also gives the snakes more visual “texture” as they fly out.
I don’t do this for the ones that I sell as many people like the individual snakes. This is something that’s really easy to do and you can hand sew them together really quickly if you wanted your set like that.
The batch of Snake Wand Surprises that I’m working on will be ready and available for sale later today. I’m trying to have a bunch ready for this summer as my travel schedule won’t allow me time to make them once my summer performing schedule gets busy in a about a week.
I was playing with an interactive “touch the screen” style trick for father’s day. This is the type of trick where someone starts by touching a object, then spells/counts several times eventually ending up on an object that you know.
The cool thing that I noticed is that if you spell the three words HAPPY FATHERS DAY the math works out for each word for to make it easy.
To do this you’ll start with five objects. These could simply be little pieces of paper that say things about dads, or whatever. You will line these up. For simplicity, I’m going to just use the numbers 1-5.
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5
Touch the one on the left. You are going to move one space per letter. You can move left or right, but only to the one next to it, you can jump spaces or from end to end. Spell HAPPY, moving one space per letter and keep touching that one.
You’re not on the one or the five, so I’ll eliminate those.
2 – 3 – 4
Now you’ll spell FATHERS moving one space for each letter.
You’re not on the four, so I’ll take that one away.
2 – 3
Now spell DAY, moving one space per letter.
You’re on the 2!
That’s a very simple interactive math trick you can do for father’s day!
The is the lost live episode from the 2024 Moisture Festival! In this episode Louie chats with four different performers! We chat with Maria Margiyeva, Ricardo Sosa,Richard Hartnell and Steve Owens!
This fun visit with some Moisture Festival favorites!
Last October I started working on a rising card routine for stage and it’s coming along. The routine is that two cards are selected, returned to the pack and the deck is put into a glass. The spectator holds the glass and the first card appears on the top of the deck in the glass, then the second card rises out of the deck.
One of the challenges is that when I’m out performing at fairs the traditional rising card weight method gimmicks doesn’t last long. I think the heat and dust are what make them less reliable after about a week. In my search for a better way to do it as I like the trick, I came across The Mobius Rising Card.
This is essentially the same as the weight gimmick, with a few improvements…but I think that’s what has fixed the gimmick for how I work it. First the weight is heavier, which will help the cards to keep rising after there’s a bit of gunk in it. Then the “string” which pulls the card has been replaced by something else, and I think this is a BIG improvement as it distributes the weight better and allows the gimmick to be thinner. They are selling the trick on the gimmick being only six cards thick, and for my routine that’s not something I need. I’m not complaining that the gimmick is thin, but since this isn’t a close up routine I’m working on, it’s not something that’s a huge factor for me.
I’ve only used The Mobius Rising Card for a handful of gigs so far and I really like it over the classic construction of the weight version of the rising cards. It’s actually an improvement, and not just another way to make the weight work.
If you do the rising cards, and are looking for a more reliable version of the weight, I like this one!
