One of the easiest ways to create magic is to put restrictions on whatever you are creating. Right now everyone on social media is complaining about egg prices. So the natural thing would be to create a trick with an egg. Here’s a quick and simple trick with an egg with the presentation hook of egg prices.
The trick is simple and direct, it’s an egg color change, with a presentation hook of white eggs being cheaper than brown eggs. As far as I know, I’m the only one doing color changing eggs this way…
I’ve been working on a trick for my platform/stage show that’s essentially an invisible deck. Well, it started out as an invisible deck and has gone through a lot of changes and doesn’t really resemble a traditional invisible deck routine.
The effect is that the audience eliminates half of the cards over and over until there is one card left, and that card matches the prediction.
I’m working on a platform version of it for my carry on luggage magic show. This will end with the card in an envelope in my wallet. Here’s video of an early test of it:
This is essentially Mark Oberon’s Bang On, but modified so that I only need two wallets and can show the back of the card as it comes out of the wallet.
This routine is really no longer the invisible deck or the Bang On routine. It’s now a mix of methods and you couldn’t do the trick how I do it with the standard props that come with either of those tricks. To me this is what more magicians should be doing. Taking standard tricks and really making them their own, not just with adding a joke or “filtering it through your personality” but actually changing the trick to fit your artistic vision.
Got out there a make actual art, not paint by numbers art.
Last week in Seattle, he had an ice storm where the city got covered in a sheet of ice from freezing rain. That gave me a day off to play around, no shows or emails to return. I used this time to get to some ideas that have been in notebooks for awhile.
Here’s a close up dancing hank style magic trick that I had a while ago:
The ending with the smoke in the jar was an idea I had for another trick that didn’t work out, but added something to this trick.
Is this trick better than a standard floating bill? I don’t know, it’s potentially more workable as there’s less issues with the IT being visible. It could work in a parlor type setting. It would take away my biggest issue with using IT and that’s dealing with lighting or having to cut the bit because you can’t make it work with the existing lighting.
I may play with this a bit more, as the jumping action for me works better with my performing persona that the bill floating.
-Louie PS I’m aware that this is essentially a smaller version of Sean Bogunia’s Extreme Dancing Hank, but with a different, but similar gimmick and a slight variation in method.
I’ve always said the easiest way to create new things is to use a holiday. Yesterday was the winter solstice and I made a little trick, that’s based on the myth of balancing an egg on end.
I posted it to TikTok and you can follow me there at https://www.tiktok.com/@louiefoxx
Years ago Charlie Frye put out a little gimmick that let you spin a poker chip on your finger tip called Frye’s Chips. Here’s the video of it:
It’s a clever little gimmick that does exactly what’s in the video. I always thought it’d be cool to do it with a coin and not a poker chip. However I think the reason he did it with a poker chip is that it’s easier to gimmick a poker chip than a coin.
The idea has been in my head and a couple months ago I was at Hocus-Pocus digging around in some junk magic bins and found the card and coin for the trick Esoteric Kennedy.
Here’s the demo of Esoteric Kennedy:
The coin from that trick should work for the Frye’s Chips trick. Now I need to make the other half of the gimmick to see if it will actually spin on my finger!
In playing with the Esoteric Kennedy props, I thought that the trick really should be done with a dollar bill, as the coin and card really aren’t connected. I moved the gimmick from the card to a dollar bill:
It looks OK on a video, but I’m going to be 100% honest, the trick isn’t good for actual performance…whether it’s the original version with the card, or my version with the bill. The problem with the trick is that everything is gimmicked and nothing can be examined. You could switch out all of the props, do a Bobo Switch for the coin and top change for the card, but is all that work worth the trick?
When magicians get together and have a magic jam playing with tricks they are working on, it’s a ton of fun!
Magic Jam highlights from Nov 2022
I learn a lot at these magic jams, and get to hang out with some great friends! I don’t think I’ll ever understand magicians that say they don’t hang out with other magicians.
Do you self a favor and make friends within the magic community!
Earlier this week I was at a tradeshow and one of the tricks that I was doing in the tradeshow booth was my ending to ambitious card where I peel off the face of the card that they’ve marked and stick to to the person. I call this Full Face Peel.
The nice thing about this trick is that it’s a very different moment from most card tricks, but then the people walk around all day wearing my cards and people ask them about the cards and it brings traffic to the booth I’m at!
Magic Giveaways Should Tell a Story
Little visual things like this that people walk around with or things that they can keep and show people are things I love doing. Before you think that handing someone a card that’s simply signed, it’s not something they can show someone that tells an interesting story. With just a signed card they’d say, “I wrote my name on the card and he did a card trick with it“, which is OK, but with peeling off the face and sticking to them, it allows the to keep one of the magic moments. Or when I do mismade bill, I leave them with the bill and they can show people that (this gets me a ton of work!).
As I’ve been showing magicians the trick I’ve been doing where I peel the face off of a signed card, one of the comments that I’m frequently getting is that it must be a lot of work making the cards.
Honestly it is work, but not that much work. I’m frequently in hotels or AirBnB’s and have plenty of downtime. I can make big batches of them while I watch movies on Netflix.
Also, it’s worth mentioning how lazy and cheap many magicians are. Soo many magicians are amazed that I spend about $5 per show in things that get used up, or that I have to roll up balls of yarn for my show. That little bit of effort is what sets people apart from the pack!
I’m playing with a little card sequence where I reveal a selected card three times. The first uses two hands, the second time one hand and the third time is no hands. Here’s an early test version of the current version:
I need to figure out a slightly less clunky way to get into the third card reveal (haunted deck). I’m not sure if there’s going to be a streamlined way due to using the method along with the other two card productions (Piet Forton Pop Out and Daryl’s Hot Shot Cut).
One idea I had was to do this as a multiple selection, however from a method standpoint, I can’t really do the final phase with the card in the deck the whole time. I’d need to take it out.
…well, if I put each selection back into the deck after the reveal, I could switch the second card for the third card, and could set up the Haunted Deck at that point. The drawback is that I visually like the cards staying on the table after each reveal.
A long time ago I wrote an idea in a notebook, and it’s something I’ll never do, but even those ideas are important to write down. It needs a gimmick that I don’t have and have fallen out of fashion. A few weeks ago I was digging through the bins of broken and incomplete magic at Hocus-Pocus and found the needed gimmick to make the gimmick for my idea!
Here’s the trick (my idea is at the end):
I don’t think anyone has really used a match pull for a reproduction of the match after the vanish in a thumb tip. Usually they are used simply for the production of a lit match, then used to light flash paper/string in a stage manipulation act.
Unfortunately I think this trick is 50 years too late as magic with matches is really out of fashion with there being virtually no venues that allow smoking and with fire getting more and more difficult to insure. Had I thought of this in the 1970’s I would have a sure fire hit!
