Tag: magic show

Taking Out a routine

Not too long ago I picked up a copy of The Truth in Comedy which is about doing improv. It’s an interesting book, and I’m about a third of the way through the book. One of the main concepts if trying to find the real moments and not shoehorning jokes into a real moment.

A real moment is always more interesting than a prepared joke. I very much agree with this. In the past I’ve been more about getting to the joke and forgotten to play. I try to be good about playing, but it doesn’t always happen.

The hard part is when you have a routine that was built on audience interaction, however the real moments have become so predictable, you are just jumping joke to joke.

For me a good example is my card catch routine. This was built on playing with the audience and for the first about 50 shows it was a lot of playing. Then I noticed the routine became very scripted, people pretty much reacted the same way the whole routine. Once I realized what the routine was becoming, I started working to phase it out of the show for a bit.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the routine regularly in the show. Occasionally I’ll do the routine and it’s playing much better as I’m able to get back into the moment during the trick. It was hard taking the routine out of the show, but it’s made the routine better!

Going Forward…

Lately I’ve been thinking about my stage show, and what it will look like when venues reopen. The obvious thing is that most bits that use someone from the audience are going to have to be cut, or completely reworked. With keeping a six foot gap between you and the person helping onstage, really limits interaction with them.

A bit I was thinking about doing was having props that they use at the front of the stage. For example there would be a pen and a pad of paper and you ask someone to draw a picture. However to keep it clean, you’d have a box of gloves on the front of the stage. Now someone from the audience can perform simple tasks and do it in a safe manner.

The bit is that when they go to put on the gloves, you ask every person to do it in a different way. You could have someone put on gloves like a cowboy, and other do it like a Spanish bullfighters. Of course you’d have music or audio to back up these suggestions. I think that makes someone putting on gloves a little more exciting and opens it up to a fun moment.

My First Virtual Show

I’ve now gotten my first live virtual show completed and it was a huge learning experience. First of all, it wasn’t a full of show of me, it was a variety show that I co-hosted. Pulling together all of the technical things to make it work was a huge challenge for me. There’s a huge learning curve.

In the show we did, the format was Matt Baker and I hosted live acts. Bringing in those acts was a bit of work after reviewing the video I’ve learned to make the transitions much smoother.

I think the key to doing virtual shows is to actually go back and watch them and see what you could do better. Treat not just the show as something that can be improved, but the medium it’s delivered in. Would the show be better if it had title cards, or a canned video as a transition? Things like that, you’re not doing a magic show, you’re doing a live TV show!

Keep It Legit…

With almost every performer out of work right now. The federal government expanding unemployment to cover “gig workers” and performers are the original gig workers. My state a few days ago opened up their unemployment benefits to self employed people…people who traditionally don’t qualify for it. I applied the first night it was open and was granted benefits.

As a result of me being one of the first variety performers that I’m aware of to actually get the benefits, I’ve ended up being a consultant as to how to get the unemployment benefits from the state. I don’t mind helping people, however I’m quickly learning that people need to be grown ups and help themselves before a crisis.

When people contact me and ask for help to fill out the forms, I ask them if they’ve paid state taxes. About half of them have. Well guess what…how to you prove to the state that you’re a business if you didn’t pay them? All that work under the counter to save a couple of bucks is going to cost people thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars when they need it!

My unemployment claim was easy to file and quickly approved because it’s correct. Keep your books legit now and it will help you in the future!

State of The Virtual Show…

We’re now just over a month into the “Shelter in Place” on the West Coast and it’s interesting to have seen the boom and bust of virtual shows. I hesitate to call it a bust, because there was no real way of making any significant money from them…initially.

The amount of people that were putting out daily content has slowed to a trickle. The amount of time it takes to do that is much more than I think most people thought it would. It’s more than just turning on a webcam and talking into it.

This video sums up the virtual magic show situation about a week or two into us all being stuck at home:

https://captiongenerator.com/1771422/Virtual-magic-shows

The nice thing right now is that we’ve hit a point where creativity is king! I think people are running out of tricks that they can do, or buy. People who can do a lot with a little are crushing it! However, that will start to slow down and people need to start making money. I’m noticing more and more “ticketed” virtual shows. I think this is the way to do it. Treat it like a live show, there’s as start time and an end time and the show is only available to watch then.

Performing Live Vs. Prerecorded

On Social Media Right now, it seems like everyone is doing shows on Facebook Live.  It’s partially because it’s a new thing and seems fun, however personally I’m against it.  I want to be clear, I’m not talking about teaching things like lectures, but people performing for people to watch. Here’s the problem, it’s visually uninteresting. 

Typically, it’s a single camera, static shot of someone in a room.  Visually that gets old very quick.  Watch any produced magic TV show and you won’t see 5 minutes of video from a single point.  Now watch any TV show and you’ll notice the same.  If you Live Stream, why are you forcing your audiences to watch a static camera view your show?

We live in a world where you can do a two camera live stream where you change views or single camera, but have someone move it for different views. It’s not that hard, but you need to pump the breaks on your rush to get content out there and try to get it out in more digestible manner for the general public. 

I just completed my first “show” for social media.  Every Tuesday my brothers and I have a “virtual dinner” and one suggested I do a cooking show.  The goal of the video was to make my brothers laugh, but it took work. 

I sat down, wrote it out, then sent it to a buddy for notes and to punch it up.  For me the fun part was building the props.  Inspired by a picture that Christoper Weed had posted as a joke of a gloved hand wearing a thumb tip, I decided to do the whole show wearing gloves and had to turn “flesh colored” gimmicks into glove colored gimmicks. 

I recorded and edited it.  Editing is what makes your show watchable, and the lack of it is one of the things that I don’t like about most live streams.  I don’t need to see you sip water, or dig around in your case to grab props.  Editing is a lot of boring work, which is why I think a lot of people are taking the easy route and doing Live Streams, but doing it makes your show so much more watchable!

Hope you enjoyed my rant.  The opinions above are mine.  If yours are different, hopefully they make you think about yours. 

Making a Trick Happen…

About six months ago I had an idea for a trick, essentially it was a signed card changed from a five of spade to a four of spade. You can read my idea for method for this trick here. This is basically the trick “Picking Off The Pips” that I think I read a version of in the Amateur Magician’s Handbook by Henry Hay when I was a kid. The difference is that it’s a signed card.

I was going to make up a card, but time wise never did. Then due to the cancellations of shows due to COVID-19 I was cleaning up my office and found a set of Dry Transfer Decal Card Pips.

picking off the pip

This was probably the greatest thing that’s come out of cleaning out the office! Thanks to these I was able to easily make the gimmick for my idea.

The pip I added to the card was a bit smaller than the pips currently on a poker size deck, but I don’t think that will change how the trick works.

The trick hinges on people not being as familiar with a deck of cards as magicians are. I remember as a kid my mom coming home from work and they had a corporate trainer do a thing with a deck of cards. It wasn’t a card trick, but at the end the trainer asked if anyone had noticed anything strange with the cards. My mom was the only one who noticed that the red cards were black and the black card were red. The only reason she caught that is at that time she’d probably picked a hundred cards a week for me while I was practicing tricks. Normal audiences won’t notice.

I’m glad to have the gimmick, unfortunately I there are no audiences to do the trick for right now. I wish I could try it out.

Virtual Gigs…

When I had six weeks of work cancel, I decided I was going to grow out my facial hair until my next paid show. Unfortunately that happened the other night, and I’ll never know what my full quarantine mustache could have been. The plus side is that I did a paid gig!

At the time the show was booked, it was a 10 min spot in a cabaret show with the audience’s chairs spaced out to meet “social distancing guidelines”. Then my county added restrictions on gatherings of more than 10 people and an audience wasn’t a viable option. The producer adapted and decided to do a streaming show, so we performed live at the venue for people who watched online. Then the state added more restrictions and the hosts of the show did their part live at the venue and all the performers did their acts from home, and they were prerecorded.

The nice thing about recording my set is that I could do it twice and take the better version. I cheated it a little bit and recorded each run through with two cameras, so that using camera changes I could mix the two recordings.

The downside of recording a set by yourself is there’s no audience feedback. It’s very strange, and I think I could get used to it, but it would be my last choice in ways to perform. You either end up plowing through material, or taking long pauses that are awkward.

If I had more time to plan, and not a day to shift from a venue to the corner of my office with a backdrop thrown up, I would have approached it a bit differently. I probably would have dusted off the cups and balls and done that in my set. That’s a 5 min set that doesn’t need audience interaction. I would also have planned some more visual quick things that aren’t as good in a live setting, but work on video.

Putting Your Show Online…

Over the last week a lot of magicians have been putting their shows online. I’m talking about a youtube video of their whole show, not just streaming. In my opinion 99% of these are garbage to watch. I’m not talking about the quality of the show, but the quality of the video. They only reason I’m able to get through them is that I like to know what other people are doing around the world.


If you are going to put a video of your show online, or even a clip, the first thing you need to do is cut out any fat at the beginning and end. I watched video last night and there was 20 seconds of the stage and the back of audience’s head before anything happened. This is a common problem with social media clips, where people leave in the video them turning on or off the camera. Edit that stuff out. When you leave it in, it tells me you don’t respect the viewer enough to spend a couple of mins to edit it out.


The big thing is audio, most of the shows I’ve watched sound like they were recorded off the camera’s microphone in the back of the room. Sure you can hear the show, but you have to listen.


The final thing is that you really need to have a couple of cameras and mix up the angles. The single camera at the back of the room with a wide shot of the whole stage doesn’t cut it anymore. You could use bits of the same routine from different shows. Recently Judah Friedlander and Adam Sandler did this in their Netflix shows.


Consider those three things before you upload your show to YouTubej.

Online Instructions…

Each year more and more magic tricks are coming out that come with online instructions and that’s the only way to get the information. In theory everyone wins, you get video instructions, it drops the cost for the creator, and possibly the buyer as well. It also makes things cheaper to ship.


Now for the downside, not everyone will have access to the information. What I mean by that is that access won’t last forever like the instructions in some physical form. Sure you can download the instructions (usually), but that only is good for as long as the tricks producer has the video online.


A good example would be a trick that’s been out for several years, but you just bought it at a magic shop. You open the trick, find the download card and go to the site, but the site no longer exists. What do you do? If the company is out of business, you’re out of luck. I guess you could return it to the magic shop, however that’s doesn’t solve the problem of product being out there where producer of it got rid of content that was paid for.


Personally I don’t do online only instructions, every magic trick I sell comes with a DVD or print instructions. I do offer “bonus content” online for tricks I sell or for stuff in my lecture notes. The pain in the butt with these things is that I just changed my hosting on my website and I had to service all of those links, many are to products I haven’t sold in a few years. Unfortunately a lot of creators don’t do that.


The hard part now is that less and less computers have DVD players, how do I deliver video content without it being online? The current solution I’m considering is thumb drives. The downside is that they cost much more than DVD’s, but the upside is that they are small, and versatile. I could order 100 of them and use them for a variety of different products.


If you’re a magic producer, you need to think about what’s going to happen when someone buys your trick 5 years from now…unless you’re just in it for a quick money grab (but then you’re an a-hole).