magic show – Page 10 – MagicShow.Tips

Lucky Penny Magic Trick

A trick I’ve been doing as part of my EDC magic is signed penny to key fob. The effect is a signed coin ends up permanently sealed inside of a “lucky coin” holder on your keychain. The nice thing about this is that it’s almost 100% self contained. I have everything I need to do the trick on my keychain, except a marker.

I’ve been using my original first design for a little bit and spent a little bit of time other day tweaking the design. The colors are just what was in the printer and have nothing to do with the design, besides making it easier to tell them apart.

The first redesign was good, the second was better and the third was a huge step backwards. I went back to the second redesign and it was the best of the three. That’s the great thing about 3D printing, it’s easy to tweak designs to get them where you want them!

-Louie

Driving vs Flying to a gig

Recently I posted a picture of my gear for a 90 minute theater show that I drove to:

and now here’s two 45 minute theater shows AND a week of my personal stuff (clothes, laptop, etc):

When flying to a gig, there’s a lot of things that I don’t bring. For example all of my stuff that has a base can use a microphone stand for a base which the venue can provide. I also have versions of a couple of bulkier props that pack smaller, and that saves a lot of space. Also the flying version of the show is a lot more organized, as space is the most important thing.

-Louie

Packing a 90 Minute Stage Show

I’m always interested in what magicians shows look like when packed up. Here’s what my 90 minute stage show looks like (when travelling by car).

For this gig I packed everything I needed. If I was flying to the gig I wouldn’t bring many things like mic stands that I use for bases for props. I have the venue provide those. Then there are things like the crank organ that I wouldn’t take if I was flying.

That’s a peek into the trunk of my car!

-Louie

Look Good On Stage!

I’m really glad that in 2020 I learned to do stage make up.

Coming out of comedy rooms, it’s something that people don’t really do. What I do is very basic, it’s just to take shine off of my face, so nothing crazy. It does make a huge difference when performing in the lights at a theater.

If you don’t know how to do it, learn to do it! I asked a friend of mine who is a stage actor and he referred me to someone who gave me a lesson.

-Louie

Magic UnCorked in Portland!

A couple of nights ago I made it out to Magic Uncorked in Portland, OR. It’s a magic show in a wine shop that happens semi regularly. The show features three performers and is a lot of fun!

I’m new to this area, however it seems that magicians are really out there supporting magic, there were about six of us that weren’t performing!

Its a great venue and the performers were John Stevens, Moto, Craig Martin and hosted by Dave, who is a magician and co-owns the wine shop Ora et Labora.

The show started at 6pm with drinks and roving close up magic, then the parlor style show started at 7:30pm and went till just past 9pm. For $35 a ticket that included a drink, it was a great deal!

If you have shows in your area, go out and support them!

-Louie

This is the Spot!

If you do a remotely fun show for kids, you’ve have a kid pee during your show because they’re having too much fun and don’t want to get up, or you make them laugh too hard. The other night I had a kid helping me and she was laughing super hard, she stopped and said, “I just peed”!

This is always a hard thing to navigate, you need to deal with it, but in a way that causes the least amount of attention. In this instance the kid didn’t seem in distress and was remarkably calm, so I said, “we’ll pause this trick and you can take care of it”. She left and got a change of clothes and while she was gone I did another routine. Once she was back, we picked up the routine where we left off.

Oh, I had a paper towel in my case, so I put it on the spot. Not so much to clean it up, but to mark it for me so I knew where it was.

Every time this happens you need to instantly read the situation to know what the appropriate way to handle it is.

-Louie

Stages!

It’s crazy how the stages that I perform on vary. One night I’m on this stage that’s state of the art with a 7 person tech crew!

Then the next show I’m on a stage like this with very minimal tech and no crew.

How I do my show, the core show is without any production and when I can use production, it’s a bonus! However it’s a bonus that I’ve planned for!

-Louie

Showcase

Last week I was at an entertainment showcase. These are where performers do a bit of their show for people who book acts/shows. When watching bands, my number one note for them is to not talk! The amount of banter they do is ridiculous, it’s not a show, you’ve got 15 minute to wow a booker and when they waste 3-5 mins on uninteresting talking on the mic, their show doesn’t look tight.

I love it when I see an act come in to get booked. A good example is Patrick, he came in did a high energy 15 minute set with no wasted time!

I was there showcasing my crank organ as a “roving act”. This is different from stage showcase, you can connect with people differently and have more time. My roving showcase had 45 minutes.

With that time I try my best to connect with people and educate them on how they can use this act at their event. Trying to sell something like the crank organ for events is a bit harder because most people have never seen one and don’t know how they’d use it for their event.

If you’re not using showcases to sell your show, you should look into them, virtually every market has some sort of showcase!

-Louie

Inject 2 Still Not Working

We’re 22 days into the year and Inject 2 has only been working for about a week. Greg Rostami’s last update was two days ago:

While hindsight it 20/20, if Greg had started to move Inject 2 during the first outage almost a month ago, it’d almost be done and up and running. He keeps claiming there are back up plans, but we have yet to see any of them implemented. There’s no reason he couldn’t start working on the backup plan while still trying to resolve the current issue. Sure it takes time, but it appears he’s just in a holding pattern with Google.

App’s are interesting, but if they’re internet based, they aren’t reliable. This is for many reasons, and this is just one of them. There’s plenty others, like I work a lot of GIANT events where there are just soo many people the internet works at a snails pace. There there are times with magic apps where the server that the app lives on gets overwhelmed because there are a ton of magicians using the app at the same time. This happened to an app (I don’t remember which one) on New Years Eve a few years ago.

Then there are times when your phone that the app is on updates overnight and now there are compatibility issues with the app and your phone that weren’t there the day before.

Before you buy an app you need to consider how you’re planning on using it and how it can fail you. If the app goes out mid trick, what are you going to do? If the app glitches and all of the sudden the spectator’s screen shows something they’re not supposed to, what would you do?

Plan for failure!

-Louie

Being Seen Offstage!

When you perform and there’s a stage, use it! It took me a while to learn this, and I’m glad I figured it out a long time ago. Before I go further, there are times and reasons to be in front of the stage, or in the audience, so this isn’t a hard rule.

Here’s an example, I was watching a performer do the cups and balls and they’re performing on the floor in front of the stage. Here’s what I could see sitting in the back:

The lady standing was moving to the back to where she could stand to see. Don’t worry about her, she’s not what this is about. It’s about the cups and balls on the table and about waist height to the performer.

What does this picture tell you?

It tells me that if I’m on the same level as the audience (the floor), anything held below my shoulders can’t be seen six rows back.

So how do you do the cups and balls onstage?

That’s the challenge because if your tabletop is flat, then the people in the front rows can’t see as the bottom of the table is blocking their view.

You could move the table further upstage and that will help a bit. What I did when I used to do cups and balls was put a “rake” to my table, so the front end was lower than the back end. My table also had a small lip that would stop the balls from rolling off. It was a workable solution and an option.

One thing that’s helpful is to watch magic shows from different seats in the audience and pay attention to when you can’t see things. Not just when they’re performing, but if a magician walks into the audience, how much of them can you see? You can use this information to help you decide to go into the audience and if you do, how to do it so that things can be seen.

-Louie