Be Crazy…

There are many points in my career where I look back and am amazed at where dopey ideas I’ve had for my show have taken me. That’s one of the secrets to my career, not being afraid to try things.

What’s your crazy idea?

What’s the next step to making it a reality?

One of the things I’ve learned is developing ideas is a series of peaks and valleys. Once you solve one problem, you are frequently then greeting with another problem. whoever can power through all all of the challenges wins.

I remember chatting with Brian from Creative Magic about the Change Cap that he put out. The Change Cap was a change bag built into a baseball cap. Brian told me that tons of magicians told him the idea of a change bag built into a hat was their idea. He would then ask if they ever made one, and no one had every successfully made one.

Having and idea and actually making the idea happen are frequently two very different things! Usually the idea is the easy part, making it a reality is the real work!

Gimmicked Envelope…

A few nights ago I woke up with a idea for a gimmicked envelope at about 3:30am. I went back to bed without writing it down. Then an hour later I woke up with the same gimmicked envelope idea “fleshed” out a bit more in terms of a routine. I went back to bed without writing it down again. I got up once more about 90 mins later with a more fully formed routine for the trick and immediately went to the office to build the gimmick!

First of all, if you wake up with an idea, you should always write it down. Most of the time if you got back to sleep, the idea is gone. I’m lucky that I work up multiple times with the idea and it wasn’t lost. Here’s the gimmicked envelope with a jumbo card inside:

I’m not sure that an envelope has been gimmicked this way before. Basically what it does is allows something to be loaded into the envelope.

What I like about this is that in the picture above you can clearly see the gimmick. It’s hidden in plain sight, and that’s what makes it interesting for me. Tomorrow I’ll kind of write up the rough routine for it.