magic advice Archives

How Magicians Use Misdirection

The new magic tricks you have ordered have finally arrived! That package is just waiting to be ripped open and it’s secrets consumed! You play with the props and have a go at working out how the trick is done, then settle down to read or watch the instructions. If you picked wisely, you have a great magic routine to practice and perform. If not.. well, there’s always something to learn from any magic trick. Chances are, even a magic trick that did not live up to your expectations can help you develop your skills and understanding. But there is almost always something missing…

What they never teach you

There’s a group of core skills that will set a magician apart from someone who only buys and performs tricks from a magic shop. It’s not included in the instruction DVD’s that come with the tricks, yet is probably the most important to learn. It’s misdirection techniques.

Understanding how magicians use misdirection will allow you to make your magic more powerful. It is vital to successfully fooling your audience. Misdirection makes magic stronger. It makes you a better performer. However, it is the ‘unspoken’ art within magic, and finding good theory and resources on the topic is hard to come by.

How magicians use misdirection

This may surprise you, but there really are some people who find the term ‘misdirection’ offensive. They argue that to use the prefix ‘mis’ generally has negative connotations. Words such as ‘mistake’, ‘misfortune’, ‘misunderstand’ and ‘misuse’ all suggest negative aspects of the technique. So ‘misdirection’ implies that you have failed at ‘directing’. So if we want to keep everyone happy and can’t call it ‘misdirection’, what do we call it? We don’t have any problem with the term ‘misdirection’; however, some people prefer to call it ‘Direction of Attention’. In a way this does express its meaning much more clearly, and doesn’t have the negative connotations of using ‘mis’. Whatever you like to call it, the great news is that it’s not hard to do at all, if you know what you are doing.

‘Misdirection has nothing to do with distraction. It has everything to do with controlling audience attention, at all times.’ – Gary Kurtz

“Not only shouldn’t they see anything, they shouldn’t suspect anything” – Erdnase

As a magician, you must learn how magicians use misdirection to make sure your spectators don’t see the things you do not want them to see. It’s not about hiding moves. It’s not about turning your back while you do a suspicious half pass; it’s about controlling audience attention so that when you are going to make a move, the audience is not only focused somewhere else, but they don’t even suspect you are doing anything. It is about making sure that suspicion doesn’t even cross your spectator’s mind. ‘A sleight is not perfect when the spectators are unable to tell what you’re doing. Only when they’re completely unaware that you did anything at all, will they experience magic.’ – Jarle Leirpoll

Better than a poke in the eye

You’ve heard the old expression “the quickness of the hand deceives the eye” right? Well, guess what, it’s wrong! Eyes have the power to track you hand movements a lot faster than your hands are able to move. Quick moves done in full view only create suspicion, and we really do not want suspicion at all. The hand is not quicker than the eye. Misdirection is quicker than the eye!

Want to learn more? Clint Baron and The Merchant of Magic Team have put together a guide to help you understand how magicians use misdirection and ways to build it into your own performance. The free ebook will teach you the core principles to help improve your magic.

Why Should People Care About Your Magic Tricks

by Merchant of Magic 3 Comments

By Dominic Reyes

Another event, party, product launch, wedding or trade show. Good food, friends and entertainment all around and there’s a magician too!

“Did you see the magician? He was amazing! How on earth did he get my money inside an egg? Anyway.. about that project we need to work on next Wednesday….”

That’s it, that’s the sum of all the hard work most magicians produce after leaving a table. A chat about how good the magician was and how impossible the magic tricks were. Then it’s yesterdays news and life goes on. Why is that?

Let’s look at what was said in detail:

“Did you see the magician…”

Chances are your spectators will not remember your name just a few minutes after seeing you do something impossible they have never seen before. Let’s face it, who you are is completely overshadowed by what you did. The spectators know it was a magic trick, after all you were actually there as a magician professionally trained to fool them. The trick was great, but it’s ‘only’ entertainment. It has very little ‘meaning’ to the spectator other than a few minutes of fun in the whole context of their evening. The credit for it, in their minds is passed onto the event rather than you. ‘Wow, that party last night was amazing, did you see the magician?” The party gets the credit.

“He was amazing…”

Great job, well done! We all love hearing that, especially when we overhear it as we leave a room, or walk part a door and a table is talking about what they just saw. Wouldn’t it be better if they were using your name and talking about more than just how skilled you were? How can you connect at a deeper level than simply a review of your ability?

“How on earth did he get my money inside an egg?…”

The magic trick worked and they were fooled. Another good job. But wait, they are saying that they couldn’t work out the method you used. Essentially reducing what they saw to a puzzle and a question. They are not saying “I wonder if he could make money appear wherever he likes” or “If I could do that, I’d use that power to make a million pounds appear” They are trying to think up a solution to a problem you have given them.

“Anyway.. About that project we need to work on next Wednesday….”

That’s it… On to the next thing to entertain them, or the next discussion, the course of the meal or a trip to the bar. The rest of the evening rolls on, and your magic tricks form only a small part of that nights fun. If you are wise, you handed out business cards as much as possible, and some of the guests will have events being planned and took a card. But the majority of guests will not remember you personally.

A few ways you can make people care about your magic tricks:

(I’ll leave the best one until last)

1) Use your name at the beginning and end of the ‘act’. Remember how Paul Daniels used to get spectators to say “yes, Paul” all though his routines. That’s not just for the comedy value, but a deliberate yet subtle technique of repetition to make them remember his name. Check out Bill Malone‘s method, He gets everyone to chant “BILL..MA..LONE, BILL..MA..LONE” over and over again. Not so subtle at all but it’s funny and fits his style. Use your name often and also say their names as much a possible. Their name is one of the most important words they ever hear. You can make people care about your magic tricks, by linking it with something else that they already care about

2) Ask the group if they have any questions. Try it next time you do a table. Perform your favorite routine and then ask them if they have any questions about it. If you used a spectator to help you, stop for a moment and ask them to tell you how that made them feel.

Example: You ask a spectator to hold a sponge ball. You show another ball and vanish it, when the spectator opens their hand, they find your ball has appeared in their hand too! After the spectator calms down, ask her how she felt about it. She will say something like ‘wow, that felt so strange, it just appeared.. etc’. The the rest of the table will enjoy watching this, just like audiences love the ‘David Blaine‘ style spectator interviews on his specials.

You don’t need to turn the rest of the act into a discussion, but you will find a lot of the table do have questions they love to ask you. You can give them some funny answers and use that to lead into your next trick.

3) Don’t just be ‘The Magician’. People don’t care about tricks, they care about people. Make yourself more than just a member of staff at the event. If you have watched the Dynamo Magician Impossible TV series, you probably noticed that the framework for the show focuses on his back story. It’s about his friends, his family, where he grew up and even about his skeptical gran. That’s not filler. It’s designed to make you engage with him as a person and like him. Understanding who he is, gives him more emotional weight. His tricks fool you, but you also feel you know him as a person and he is so much more memorable because of this. This is one of the main reasons X-Factor became so popular and people love the audition shows. The back stories hook you to a particular performer and that leads you to support them through the finals.

You can do this by introducing magic tricks into your set that give your spectators an insight into you and your past. Introduce a trick as the one you had to learn to become a magician, and tell a back story about it. Build in some information about how you discovered magic and why you do it.
A good example of this sort of routine is the magic trick ChildsPlay. It uses a photograph of one of your family members to reveal a chosen playing card. The routine leads perfectly into telling the audience something about you as a person. If they care about you, they will love your magic so much more and you will be remembered long after the event has been forgotten.

Let them care about you.

If you want people to care about your magic tricks, remember this: People remember things they care about. If you give your audience a back story you help remove the faceless roll of ‘Magician’. Knowing about a person makes you care about that person. There’s no need to add your whole life story to your show, but if you look at the tricks you currently do, is there something you could add to give some information about yourself to the audience? Play with this and see if it helps you become more memorable.

Dominic Reyes

Please let us know your thought on this and any advice you would like to share in the comments section below:

Do You Hate Magicians Using Scripts?

by Merchant of Magic 12 Comments

By Dominic Reyes

“It usually takes three weeks to prepare

for a good impromptu speech.” – Mark Twain

You practice a trick, master the moves, get the timing perfect, and the misdirection faultless, now what are you going to say as you perform the trick?

You have two basic choices:

‘Wing it’ and see what happens
Create a script

If you look at ‘world class’ public speakers, comedians and even politicians, they can look like they just chat informally to their audience, moving from topic to topic as the presentation flows.
Actually, they are often highly prepared, rehearsed and scripted in everything they do on stage. They work hard to understand, which words they should and which words they should not use.

If you want a convincer about the power of magicians using scripts,we recommend that you go and see Derren Brown perform live next time he is appearing in your area. Make an investment and buy tickets to the same show on two different nights. Noticing when the parts that seem to be ‘ad-lib’ or ‘off the cuff’ are repeated. They are carefully built into his performance to look completely natural. He’s an expert at this and you will learn a great deal from just the price of an extra ticket.

We will be covering the ‘winging it’ approach in a future post, but today we want to look at the following common objection to using a script:

I don’t want to sound scripted!

You really don’t have to at all. The secret is an additional step, often overlooked when magicians work on their magic tricks. It’s the extra work that professional actors and public speakers use to set themselves apart from the competition.

Magicians Using Scripts – The extra step:

Rehearse your script until you sound very ‘canned’

Then rehearse and tweak it until you sound natural and organic giving the lines.

Once you have the script memorized, the real work starts. Listen to how you sound when you say the script. Record yourself reciting it and play the recording back repeatedly. Note the pace and the tone of your delivery. Ask yourself what you could adjust to make each part sound natural and organic. When you say something funny, does it sound forced? If so, how could you deliver that line better?

The payoff for putting in this extra work will show in your performances almost instantly. It may seem like a lot of hassle when it’s far more exciting to start learning the next magic trick instead. However, that’s the whole point. This work on your presentation is part of the process that will set you apart from the average performer.

If you would like to learn more about creating a script for your magic, we recommend the following book Scripting Magic by Pete McCabe

Please let us know your thoughts about magicians using scripts in the comments section below: