Professional London magician Alan Hudson recently published a great presentation idea for working magicians: The Secret Room.

Close up magicians don't tend to like very small parties. Most walk around magicians have a small range of working magic tricks that have been carefully built into well crafted and paced 'sets'. The magician mixes with the guests and works through a set with each small group. This works well for table magic, or strolling through a large number of people that are gathered together in groups. However, it's a different story when a walk-around magician needs to work with a small party. Here's a few problems that often occur with small guest counts:

All the guests may be together in one large circle, or banquet table.
There are so few guests that everyone sees the magic at the same time.
The guests mix groups continually, so each group contains people that have already seen you perform.
The event has a lot of interruptions, awards, speeches or games planned to run through the whole event.
This new way of presenting your magic is a great way to fix many of the issues that small groups throw at close up magicians.

What is a Magicians Secret Room?

The Secret room is a great way to offer something unique to a client hosting a small party that has less than 100 guests. A private room is allocated as The Secret Room. Alternatively, a special small marquee is set up as The Secret Room. Throughout the event, small groups of guests are invited to enter The Secret Room and discover it's secret. Either the client picks people through the event, or everyone gets a ticket with their allocated time to enter.

The guests are not told what they will find in the Secret Room. This builds excitement, anticipation and curiosity, three things that really help create a buzz, and talking point.

Inside The Secret Room.

At their allocated time, a small group of guests (Between 4-12 depending on the size of the guest list) enter the Secret Room and discover a magician waiting for them inside.

They then receive a 10-15 minute close up magic show just for them. This would be an expanded set that the magician would normally perform during close up walk around magic. However, due to the controlled conditions and lack of interruption, the set can contain magic tricks that would not normally be ideal to perform strolling. The magic is performed in a perfect setting, free from interruptions, noise, and distraction. The experience is much more exciting for the spectators and liberating for the magician. It's like a mini magic theatre set up in the party venue.

After the show, the guests are asked to keep the secret, and not tell anyone about what they found inside the room. That's great fun for the guests, creates a buzz and a surprise for the rest of the guests.

Why The Secret Room works so well.

The guests receive a private and unique show.
All the guests take part, so everyone gets to see the magic.
The magician has control of the situation and can perform magic tricks without the restrictions of pocket space, lighting, sound levels and large group dynamics.
The magic doesn't get interrupted by guests suddenly joining or leaving the group.
The client can build a buzz about the feature event. A secret room pushes the magician as the feature event of the evening.

Building magic packages.

Alan Hudson's idea of the Secret Room is an excellent example of thinking outside the box about the way you present your magic commercially. The Secret room can be marketed to cleints that might otherwise struggle to build magic into their event. The room can be a conference room at a hotel, the dinning room in a private house, or even a custom tent supplied by the magician. It can be a bolt on service supplied by an agent, or a feature marketing package for independent magicians. Most magicians constantly search for magic tricks that will fit their working conditions, rather than looking at ways to change the conditions instead. Alan has taken all of the disadvantages of walk-around close up magic and found a way to remove them. He has an entertaining way of defining his own working conditions for his magic tricks. The Secret Room combines mix and mingle magic with a parlor show, in a package that can be marketed to almost any event. It's a great example of the ingenuity magicians mainly apply to creating magic tricks, being turned onto the commercial presentation of magic to the public.

Do This.

Make a list of all the 'problems' you face when you perform magic to the public. What aspects of performance in the real world do you dislike, or feel could be improved? Think about ways to present the magic in new formats that would solve those issues. Could these new ways of presenting magic be appealing commercially? By changing how you present your magic, could you solve problems that both yourself as a performer, and your client face together?

About Alan Hudson

Alan Hudson is one of the UK's leading close magicians for both corporate and private events. As well as close up magic, he offers a great stand up comedy cabaret show featuring mind reading, magic and stand up comedy. Find out more about Alan and read his excellent blog here

Ben Hanlin Tricked – What Magicians Can Learn From the Magic TV Shows

by Dominic Reyes 2 Comments

What Magicians can learn from Tricked with Ben Hanlin

Before Tricked, Ben Hanlin began making waves in the magic world a few years ago with his You Tube channel MagicBoy TV. He traveled up and down the country tracking down celebrities using the power of social networking sites and nothing else. It was a great example of how the world is changing in this era of modern technology. Ben Hanlin then was cast as part of a very popular TV Series called Breaking Magic. Upon its success Ben has now risen to greater heights and has been granted his own show – Tricked. He is a great magician with bags of charisma, but don’t let that fool you, he also has a cheeky, more sinister side that can show its face!

The Style of Magic

Ben Hanlin Tricked is a cross between a street magic show and a hidden camera show. Ben Hanlin travels around posing as different types of people, whether it be an interviewer for ITV2, a crew member at a photoshoot or a security guard and then shows unsuspecting members of the public magic tricks. Sometimes it is revealed that they have been part of a hidden camera magic show, sometimes it isn’t, the members of the public are just left to figure what just happened out themselves!

Expect to see lots of great close up magic in Ben Hanlin Tricked that isn’t your standard card tricks and coin magic. For example in Episode One Ben Hanlin pulls a full 1 litre Vodka bottle from someone’s shoe!

How Can Watching Tricked Be Useful for Magicians.

Ben Hanlin – Tricked has many lessons to learn from watching it. Ben Hanlin is a naturally easy going character, and he instantly sets the spectators at ease with his personality. He smiles and makes a lot of eye contact; he laughs and has fun, and he is also very talented and creative. All of these points shine through when you watch Ben Hanlin – Tricked.

The magic tricks in Ben Hanlin – Tricked is well thought out and takes some planning, do not dismiss every magic trick you see on TV as a TV trick or using stooges. Some performances on TV do of course use stooges. However, a lot more thought is put into these things than just using a stooge. Try to think of ways that the magic tricks in Ben Hanlin – Tricked could be achieved without stooges and actors (as they really aren’t stooges and actors!). This is how you can really benefit, challenge yourself to come up with your own methods for ideas, use these ideas as inspiration to come up with your own magic tricks, this will help you become a more individual performer and help you break away from the magic tricks that everyone does and be more unique.

We here at the Merchant of Magic believe that watching any performance can help you as a performer. If you watch a bad performance, you can see what is wrong and make sure you do not fall into the same trap. If you watch a great performance, you can learn form how they have performed and utilise what you have learned in your own set of magic tricks.

The Use of Celebrities

Ben Hanlin – Tricked uses celebrities in a way to gain attention from not only the viewers but from anyone involved. If you can get in front of important people, you must be someone important!

However, this does not mean that you cannot use this thinking to your advantage. Maybe you live in a city near where there are celebrity hot spots like The Ivy, or Annabels in London. There is nothing preventing you (apart from security!) from trying to either get into one of these venues by showing your skills of entertainment. Alternatively, you could simply wait around outside entertaining people until someone famous ventures outside and take your chance at amazing them. Be sure to have a camera with you though!

If you do not fancy doing this why not take that style of thinking and apply it to the most important person at your gigs. A company CEO or the person whom the party is being thrown for for instance. This will attract a lot of attention to your magic and also create a lot more conversation about it. When a company has a party the magician can be talked about for a short while the day they get back to the office, but if you perform a magic trick on the company CEO it will be talked about for years!

You can catch Ben Hanlin – Tricked on ITV2 at 9pm on Thursdays. The Merchant of Magic gives Ben Hanlin – Tricked two thumb tips up! Its style and substance are both right up there, and the magic is all very good and inspiring. It is always good to see magic on TV, and when it is presented by someone as entertaining and likeable as Ben Hanlin it makes it all the more enjoyable! Well done Ben, roll on the next Episode!

Magicians Testimonials – Creating Fake Audience Feedback or Reviews

by Dominic Reyes Leave a Comment

We received this question about using actors in magicians testimonials:

I have a question about video testimonials. I've been collecting some, but even when people are enthusiastic, some just don't come across very well. Do you think it would be acceptable to hire someone to record the same testimonial that was given by an actual person without saying that it's a paid testimonial (which would sort of defeat the purpose) ?

Don't fake customer testimonials.

People WILL spot that something is fake. Remember how hard it is, even for professional actors to pretend to be members of the public. It always has a scripted feel, and you sense that the person is an actor or stooge. It's easy to spot fake enthusiasm. Faking testimonials that just use actor to deliver them can still ruin trust. An acted magicians audience testimonial may still be seen as 'fake' even when you keep the true feedback content unedited. The goal of testimonials is to create trust and 'social proof' about your services.

Raw and real customer testimonials.

The best testimonials look raw, real and unedited. They may not look professionally produced, but they meet the goal of the testimonial perfectly. Real people, saying how awesome you are, or that they were fooled by your magic tricks. A client is interested in real people's reactions, so even 'home made' quality footage appears authentic.

There's nothing to stop you asking a friend or even another spectator to film some feedback on your smartphone video camera. The venue is a live event, so it's even better when it looks like the place is buzzing, noisy, and full of energy.

Swearing.

Although you shouldn't edit a spectators feedback, it's fine to bleep out swearing, or blur out anything inappropriate in the footage. Even though you may be an adult entertainer, you should still be considerate of everyone what is viewing the footage.

If you really need to change the footage.

Sometimes the footage may be too poor quality to use. Perhaps the audio failed or the footage when totally out of focus. If the magicians testimonials are so good that you really want to include them, convert the testimonials to text and show a picture or screen grab of the person next to it.

Collecting magicians testimonials is one of the most effective forms of marketing a magician can use. There's no need to worry about low quality footage as long as it's genuine and represents your services well.