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Magicians Bad Habits – Chatting About Magic Tricks Part 2

Part 2 of the cleaned up transcript of the MoM Podcast episode 1. Three magicians sat in a magic shop talking about practicing their magic tricks. This section is about magicians bad habits.

Pauls Bad Habit:

Paul Knight One of my bad habits is when I’m learning or practicing routines or tricks, whatever you wish to call it, I start making my own patter as I’m learning it. I should really learn the trick first then revisit it and try and figure out a patter and there’s not much advice out there on patter.

Dominic Reyes It’s tricky because you don’t want to just practice in silence because you’re not going to perform in silence. So using the voice acts as a cue to the moves. Especially later, if you practice over a long period and then try and show it to someone you find you hesitate and you pause and you freeze, generally it tends to be the fact that you’ve been practicing in silence.

Paul Knight You’ve been practicing the moves and the mechanics of the magic trickstricks, but not actually the performance of the effect. Practicing the performance and learning about that is just as important really. If you want to be serious.

Ben Williams So how do you do that? How do you practice?

Paul Knight I actually speak out loud when I’m on my own practicing. Once I did set up three teddy bears around the table and practiced it on those. I was having a great conversation and the patter flowed, but the reaction wasn’t what I expected. [Laughter]

Dominic Reyes Really?

Paul Knight It was a tough gig. That helped though. This sounds really ridiculous, but it helped.

Ben Williams It was a fluff gig. {Laughter]

Paul Knight It gave me points to look at, places to look at when I was performing. Which gave me cues to what part in the routine am I?

Ben Williams Exactly, I was going to bring up the point of practicing in the mirror. Practicing in the mirror is very important for getting your angles right. But if you get too caught up in doing that you will find that you’re performing your routine and you’re looking at yourself in the mirror as you do it.

When you go to perform to a real person your eyes aren’t going to be looking at yourself in the mirror. They’re going to be looking at the spectator in front of you, oh, did that person to the right see something? And your mind is in totally different places and looking at different things too. So sometimes when I’ve practiced the magic tricks and I know that my angles are good and I understand them I’ll step away from the mirror and I’ll just practice walking about. Just walking up and down my hallways practicing my patter as well because it takes you away from getting locked down. If you’re only practicing in one condition then once you step away from that condition it’s a whole new ballgame.

Dominic Reyes I agree. When I was learning the retention of vision vanish for example. I would practice it and repeat and repeat and repeat in front of the mirror. But once I didn’t have that feedback, I had a problem. I became reliant on the feedback to see whether it looks okay. It was really uncomfortable to perform the move and I wouldn’t do it.

Paul Knight Feels like everyone’s seeing it.

Ben Williams Exactly! Because you’re not getting that feedback. You’re not getting that instant check that it looks good. You need to know that it looks good in the mirror, but then you also need to practice it in the mirror so you know it looks good when you’re just looking at your hands.

Paul Knight You have to be practiced in this sort of way, if you want to feel confident. Sometimes when you perform, a spectator might whisper to another spectator, it can give you a clue that they’re following what you’re doing. Now they may well be, but the likelihood is that they think they know what you’re doing but are totally wrong.

Dominic Reyes They’re following the method they think.

Ben Williams Yeah, they’re going somewhere completely wrong, but if you don’t have confidence in your own sleights, if you haven’t practiced them enough, you’re just going to believe they know exactly what’s going on. That will cause you to speed up. It can cause you to rush through things, not allow you to be as entertaining as you can be and also it will bring down the quality of your performance for everyone else. At the end of the day, if you can have nine people really enjoy it and have one person figure it out or have 10 people not really enjoy it, which would you prefer?

Paul Knight I’d politely disregard the people who think they know..

Ben Williams Even if they know how it’s done, you get that. You can’t go through life being a magician and honestly say you’ve never had someone figured anything out that you’ve done.

Paul Knight You would be fooling yourself.

Paul Knight I’d like to fool someone just once though. [laughter]

Ben William You’ve fooled yourself. [Laughter]

Dominic Reyes I once took a part-time job where I was in a showroom as a salesman and the whole place was surrounded by great big glass windows, so I’m staring at a reflection of myself all day.

Dominic Reyes Retention, Classic Pass etc etc all day long… I’m running a coin roll all day when I’m on the phone and I’m watching it and watching it and then people started asking me ‘why are you closing your eyes?’ when I performed the moves at a gig.

Paul Knight I was just about to mention that.

Dominic Reyes Well, I don’t want to see it when I do a funny movie. It’s only by videoing myself later on, that I picked up that tell and it’s taken quite a while to get rid of it.

Paul Knight It’s a reluctance to see bad magic, I don’t know, because I do it as well.

Dominic Reyes If I can’t see it, they can’t see it.

Ben Williams You don’t know you’re doing it.

Dominic Reyes I wouldn’t have spotted that at all, so another good habit in your practice time is to video yourself and that can be quite painful to watch.

Ben Williams If you can, and not everyone has the facilities to do this, but if you can set up more than one camera so that you have multiple angles, it’s not so bad because everyone’s got some sort of video camera on their phone or you could just borrow your friends’ phones or have someone video you. You could get a nice little bit of footage of your magic tricks, which you can use to learn from.

Dominic Reyes Don’t just film yourself. Don’t just set up a camera and film yourself performing magic tricks. You can look on YouTube and find thousands of people doing that and you won’t learn very much. It needs to be you performing to an audience. You need to see the feedback you get, you need to see how you come across to an audience.

Paul Knight Even your stance.

Ben Williams Your stance, your speed, is something that you might find yourself doing is shifting your weight left to right foot nervously and you won’t pick that up unless you’re actually videoing yourself at all.

What magicians bad habits do you have? Let us know in the comments section below

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How Magicians Use Misdirection

by Merchant of Magic 4 Comments

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: