Venmo Prediction

There’s not much to this idea; it’s a confabulation routine where you predict a Venmo transaction. The three things predicted are a name, an amount, and an emoji.

Method wise, my first idea was to use a no force mental epic. There are a couple of things I don’t like about that. The main one is that you don’t have much room to write. Also, the prop doesn’t look like something that I would use in my show.

When you think about it, you just need to force the three things. Ideally this would be a routine that could be done onstage, alone, without a spectator. That leads to a simple method, the Three Section SvenPad Picasso. This is a forcing pad that’s cut into three sections.

For the routine, I’m thinking it starts by tossing a paper ball into the audience. That person selects a name. It’s tossed to a second person who chooses an amount, and finally, a third person who picks an emoji. All of those selections are them saying stop as you riffle through a section of the pad. The paper ball is tossed back to the stage, and it’s opened to reveal all of the information

This is a packs small, plays big routine!

-Louie

Making it Rain!

Performing as many shows as I do around the country at all sorts of different venues you encounter a lot of things. I just had a new one, it was a gorgeous sunny morning, but it was raining onstage!

stage magic show in the rain
stage canopy

What had happened was it was really dewey this morning and moisture had collected on the underside of the stage’s canopy. The top edge of the canopy wasn’t pulled very tight, so it had little valleys the water could pool on and form droplets that fell down on me during during my show.

It was the strangest thing because the audience really couldn’t see this, so it was something that I had to deal with. I did mention it to the audience, so that they were aware of it. That was it didn’t look strange when I pulled out wet props!

magic show case

I did have to move things around to keep more water sensitive things dry. For example my notebooks (svenpads) I put another prop over to keep them dry.

This is a case of be ready for anything that can happen when performing. You never know what you’ll be walking into!

-Louie

Reimagining The Key of Fate…

This week I’m heading down to California to perform for 8 days at a fair. It’s been over a year since I’ve done a fair gig, and that’s my core market. I’m working on something new, that’s a variation of Luca Volpe’s Key of Fate routine. I’ve made some major changes to stream line it for how I perform. The big change is that I can’t have the audience write their prizes. For me, that takes too much time, and logistically doesn’t really work out.

In lieu of this, I’m going to use SvenPads to force the prizes. I bought three of notebook SvenPad‘s that look like this:

For the routine I needed three notebooks with different covers. I bought three notebooks and swapped out the covers.

The picture above shows the process of switching the cover. Below is the final product of the three covers:

I think that using these three notebooks to force the three prizes streamlines the process. We’ll see how it ends up playing…