magic tricks – Page 2 – MagicShow.Tips

Fun Lecture!!

Last night’s lecture was a blast, it looks like we had 119 magicians attend the zoom meeting! Thanks to Drew Cardella to letting me talk to the group that he hosts every Wednesday.

One of the more fun things about the lecture was towards the end I showed something that was new that I’m working on. It was my Take Out Box production and you can read my previous posts about it by clicking here. That turned into an impromptu jam session with some great ideas. And some ideas that I had thought of and discarded for one reason or another that I’m going to revisit.

During that jam session on the take out production box a well known magician said I should release it soon “before it gets out there and someone else does“. While I agree with why I should release it soon, honestly I don’t like the idea of putting out things before they are ready. It’s a sad state of magic where someone would hear about the idea and rush to beat me to market, however that’s the nature of the business world. I’ve always said magicians need to play business like it’s a real business, that means protecting things with patents, copyright, etc. So it’s really my fault if someone gets ahead of me on putting the Take Out Box Production on the market.

-Louie

Pelican Briefcase Magic Show…

It’s taken forever, but I’m getting to work on assembling a briefcase magic show. I dug out of the shed an old Pelican 1525 case that I bought for a specific gig a while ago, then used for my outdoor kid shows in the summer of 2020.

This case had a flange on the bottom, and I took that off. It used to have a bunch of custom 3d printed holders in it, but I took them out when I started using the case for the kid shows. I did leave my Sharpie holder in the case. This is a pretty creative solution to keeping pens easily accessible. The yellow holder has magnets in it, and so do the pens. They will pretty securely in the holder, but are easy to reach in and remove.

I’m starting to play with the layout of things in the case:

I have to make some choices, like using poker size cards, or moving up to parlour or jumbo sized cards. I think that choice will end up being made for me by what props/routines end up in the show.
-Louie

Double Action Pull – Take Two

I redesigned the pulley for the double action birdcage pull that I made yesterday. The main difference is that it’s slightly larger and the hole on the non pulley side has been moved 90 degrees.

Here’s a side by side comparison with the one that I made yesterday. The old one is on the left and the new design is on the right with the strings on it.

I foreseeing possibly making it wider with the ends flaring out, so that it doesn’t roll inside the jacket and twist the line. We’ll see if that actually ends up being a problem, or if tension alone will straighten out or keep the lines straight. I’ll play with it a bit and see what happens.

If you’re curious about this style of pull, I think I first read about it in Jim Steinmeyer‘s book The Magic of Alan Wakeling. In that book it’s used to vanish a fan, however I think using a pulley on a wrist to wrist pull is much older than Wakeling using it.

-Louie

Levelling Up Magic…

This week is the final week of my “fair” season. I end my run on Saturday after performing 66 shows over 22 days at a State Fair. I really like performing at state and county fairs across the USA in the summer. One of the things that I really like about it is that in my preshow I get to work on tricks and jokes that aren’t ready for the main show.

In my show I have materials that’s A, B and C material. A is the stuff that’s finished and plays well. B are tricks that aren’t quite done yet, they’ll be things missing, like maybe the trick is there, but needs some jokes, or the routine is there, but the method or something isn’t quite right. Finally, there’s the C material, and that’s stuff that’s just ideas.

My goal for the summer is to move as much A material out of the show as I can. I do that by levelling up all the other stuff. I work hard at figuring out what’s missing from the B material, and try to move it up to the A level. Once that happens, I stop doing an A routine and put the former B trick in it’s place.

Then there’s the C material, I work on that during my preshow. The goal is to move it to B or drop it. Some ideas are just that…ideas. They may be great ideas, but they’re not for me or my show. It’s good to learn that fairly early on, so you don’t waste too much time with them. This is also why I’m a huge fan of getting material on stage as quickly as possible. That’s the easiest way to figure out if there’s something there or not.

It’s also crazy how quickly things can level up if you put in the time and effort and you have three shows a day for 22 days to work on them. For example the version of the Invisible Deck that I started doing this month (see an early version here) has moved from a C trick to B+ or A- routine in a few weeks. Once I got the technical side down and then found the presentational hook, it was just polishing it up. The routine works as is now, but there is on small technical thing I’d like to figure out…however if I never solve the problem, the routine works great in it’s current form.

I’m very fortunate to have a venue to actively work on new material!

-Louie

Bingo!

I’m was home for a day and in the mail that had been accumulating was a book called Bingo Bango by Jeff Stone. It’s a book about the classic practical joke item that makes a loud bang and surprises people.

The book is a fun read and has over 100 things you can do with the Bingo Device. There are jokes, magic tricks, gags and more.

What surprise me was that apparently at some point I had helped Jeff figure out some of the history of the is joke. I know a bit about about, when I used to work at Market Magic Shop in Seattle, I sold a ton of them. They came in many different forms, sometimes hidden in books, or pens, or even on that is held on your hand like a joy buzzer.

It was very sweet of Jeff to send me a book, and he wrote me a nice note as well:

This is a fun book, and if you’re into practical jokes it’s great! Another fun thing about this book is to see how brainstorming on one idea can lead to soo many different ideas!

Interesting Observation…

After one of my shows yesterday at the fair I’m performing at, I had a guy tell me something interesting after the show. He was a caterer and has worked with a lot of local performers, so he’s seen some magicians, and told me that. The caterer told me that my product wasn’t a magic show, it was my personality.

I 100% agree with his assessment and that’s the goal with the show. It’s not about the tricks, while they are important and I select them to hopefully move the story of my personality forward. What I’m selling is how I work, not what I work with.

Some magicians live on the the tricks that they do and that’s an easier route than trying to live on your personality. One of the hard things is when people don’t like your show, that directly means they don’t like you. Where if you do an effect driven show, if they don’t like the show they don’t like the tricks.

It’s up to you what your art is…

Crackers…

This week I’m performing at a 9 day fair and it’s been a little while since I’ve done my full stage show, so I’ve had a few little road bumps. The biggest one is that I’m not doing my cracker card trick. It’s a fun trick with some twists and turns and it’s an unusual trick.

The problem is the cracker packaging I need to do the trick doesn’t appear to be made anymore. I need to load a cracker into a cracker wrapper and seal it, and all of the packing that I’ve found recently don’t work for the resealing part, and are super tight making the loading really difficult without damaging the cracker.

After much searching, this cracker finally popped up. The packaging looks looser that what I’ve been able to get recently. While that solves one of the issues, it doesn’t solve the other. The placement of the seam on the packaging is in the middle, and that won’t work for the resealing of the cracker package.

I’ve got an idea of how to make it work, however you can’t just order one or two crackers to try out the idea. I need to order a box of 500 of them and after shipping I’m about $50 into crackers! The trick is worth the gamble, let’s hope it works when they show up on Thursday!

Magic Garage Sale

A couple of days ago I hosted a Magic Garage Sale and it was a hit! The turn out was great and the amount of magic that was re-homed that was staggering!

This is a fun way to build some community within the magic scene. We all hung out for a few hours, and this is a way more intimate thing than a more formal magic swap meet or magic auction.

Then afterwards a few of us had some beers and jammed some magic!

I’m really glad I put this together, it was a lot of fun!

Magic Garage Sale…

I’m putting together a magic garage sale on July 11th! It’s a literal garage sale, so you have to show up in person for the deals. What’s left I may try to sell on facebook used magic groups, and a lot of it will probably just go to the dump.

There’s a lot of cool stuff, and I was just going through last night and putting prices on things. The garage sale prices are pretty cheap, there are a lot of deals to be had! If I end up listing stuff on the internet for sale, it will be more than the garage sale prices.

Here’s what I priced yesterday:

There’s a lot more! If you’re going to be in the Seattle area on 7/11/21, send me an email and I’ll give you the details!

Magic Collection…

Many years ago I used to buy magic collections of magicians who had passed. I would keep the books or props that I wanted and resell the rest. It’s been a while since I have done that for myself. Last year a did sell off a collection of magic that was a friend of mine who had passed and all the money went to his son.

The other day I was contacted about a magic collection and went out and picked it up. The person had one of my Evaporation tricks, and this was from the original run of 36 that I sold at a magic convention in Canada.

One thing that I think people don’t realize is that most of the stuff in a magic collection is worthless. Usually about half is unsellable because it’s damaged, counterfeit or shipping would cost more than the prop.

You should be realistic about what your collection is worth and to not really count things that have a used value of less than $20. Sure, they do add up, but they are hard as hell to sell!