How to do Magic Tricks

Advice and Support for Magicians

How to Do Magic Tricks on TV – Live or Set Up?

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yif-iphone-in-bottle-magic-trick
A magician called Yif recently posted videos on YouTube, which many of the magic community felt were simply full of camera tricks. Magicians have discussed this in depth on magic forums and debated if the magic video was filmed with stooges and set up off camera. So, do you feel that magic on TV should only be performed in the same way a magician could perform it in live conditions?

The problems magicians face on TV.
MoveMonkey in Detroit makes a good point: Unlike at a live performance of magic, audiences watching a trick on TV or YouTube have the power to REWIND. They can enjoy infinite viewing of the performance.  This destroys many of the techniques magicians use in live magic:

  • False-memory.
  • Misdirection.
  • Change blindness.
  • Forced perspective.
  • Intersecting moments.
  • Psychological influence.

One of the golden rules of how to do magic tricks, is broken when a trick is recorded:

Never repeat a trick
Once a trick – Twice a lesson comes into play here. It’s pretty easy for viewers to back-engineer a trick they watch on YouTube if they really want to.

Are magic tricks on TV a problem?
I’ve often wondered why so many magicians insist that magic on TV should only be performed the way it would be if performed ‘live’.  We don’t insist singers only release live recordings without sound processing. We also don’t insist all TV shows are recorded theatre plays.

I’ve no idea if the tricks Yif performs use stooges. To be honest, I don’t really care.

THREE WINS:

1) If someone watches the video and is entertained, it’s done it’s job.

2) If that makes someone more likely to book a magician to see some live magic at their event, that’s great for us!

3) If it inspires a beginner to start the journey into magic, that’s great for him and the magic community.

Regardless of the material being live magic or staged magic, the footage can still help us learn how to do magic tricks. Just like a singer can learn something from a processed pop song. Yif does not rush the presentation, and allows the reactions to grow well after the magic has been performed. We can take from that and find ways to apply it to our own presentations.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts about magic tricks on trick in the comments section below.

Should Magicians Give Purpose to Magic

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I believeIf you really could perform magic, what would you do? Would there be a purpose to magic you perform?

As magicians we spend the majority of our time losing and finding playing cards, making small predictions, or having things vanish and appear around us. The tricks lack any purpose other than to entertain and amaze. What is the point of making a coin bend in a spectators hand or making a ball vanish from under one cup and appear under another, followed by the appearance of some lemons under the cups? Great magic, but utterly pointless. We can increase the power of our performances by giving a purpose to magic.

Creating purpose to magic we perform has been one of the ‘themes’ of the second series of Dynamo Magician Impossible. Let’s look at a few examples:

  1. Dynamo is talking to the DJ in a nightclub. However, the club is packed and he can’t get out past the crowds. What would he do if he really could perform magic? He would simply fly over the crowd to the exit. That’s exactly what he did.
  2. Dynamo visits HMV to meet his fans. It all gets too much and he needs to escape. What would a magic user do? Simply disappear. That’s exactly what he did.
  3. Dynamo watched a street performer and wants to reward him. He notices the performer has images of money printed on his clothes, so he turns one of the pictures real so he can give the performer a tip.

Dynamo used magic to solve his problems. That’s the purpose of magic shown on the show. How can you design your magic tricks to be useful in this way?

Purpose to Magic

I expect you may feel going from table to table entertaining people would be quite a low priority for most true magic users. So why WOULD you be an entertainer?

Perhaps, to make people believe again?

Most people believed in magic when they were kids, but then life got in the way and they came to believe what the world told them, that magic was just pretend. Could making people question this belief, be the real role of a magician?

“What would I have to do right now to make you believe in magic?”

If you ask that question whenever you next perform close up magic you will start to notice you get the same sets of answers over and over again.

  • Make a bottle of wine appear
  • Turn this £10 note into a £50 note
  • Fly
  • Make xxx disappear
  • Bend a wine glass
  • Read my mind like Derren Brown

If you collected all the questions over a period of time you will get a group of the most frequently asked questions, many of which you could have tricks ready to perform.

There would also be some answers which you couldn’t do. For example: “Make a tiger appear” or “Make my wife disappear” but it would be easy to create a set of funny answers for each of those suggestions.

You could  construct an act which allows you to perform most of those requests. You would then simply pick a suggestion from the group that ‘hits’ and actually DO it for them. Powerful stuff!

When asking the group, you ideally want to get suggestions from several different people at the table. This way you will be likely to hit upon a request that you can actually do. If you don’t get a ‘hit’ you can turn it into a joke or an aside, as you move into your normal routine set. Don’t tell them you intend to perform their suggestions until after they give them, so you have a perfect ‘out’ by changing the subject if a hit doesn’t happen.

If you decide to try this out please let me know how you get on. You can do this in the comments section below:

3 Things to Do When Your Magic Tricks Go Wrong

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epic fail

By Dominic Reyes

Opps! The magic tricks gone wrong! You asked them to pick a card and lost it in the deck, then with a sophisticated flourish you proudly revealed completely the wrong card.. Awkward silence..

What to do:

Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal. Magic tricks go wrong sometimes and no matter how much you practice, it can happen. The key is to be prepared in advance. You are not pre-recorded, you are doing something LIVE and part of the thrill for the audience is that it’s real, happening before their eyes, and they can interact with you.  The audience has not invested in you, and have nothing to risk from you making a mistake. You are there to entertain them, and if something goes a little wrong, but you carry on and DO entertain them, then they get what they want. After all, Tommy Cooper made a living from making his magic tricks go wrong. The important part is the entertainment.
Having said that, there are some things you can do to make it go much better:

1) Always have an ‘out’

As a magician you are one step ahead. You decide how the trick tricks should end and what that ending is going to be. There is no reason your magic tricks need to follow a pattern unless you told the spectators in advance what the ending is going to be. Avoid doing that!

A few easy outs to get you started:

A playing card is picked and lost in the deck. You intended to find it with a flourish, but something didn’t go right.  Just change the ending. Ask them what their card was and act confused that it could not possibly be their card as that one is not even in the deck. Go through the deck to show them it’s not even there, before taking off your shoe and letting their card fall out from inside!

Don’t know an impromptu card to shoe? Rus Andrews BOLD teaches a great impromptu version on DVD or Download

 OR


Go through the deck of playing cards looking for their card, then take out your wallet and show that the card is inside a sealed envelope in your wallet

OR

Ask them which playing card they chose and show it’s the only face down card in a face up deck that’s been in your pocket the whole time. We are thinking Invisible Deck here folks!

2) The magic trick goes wrong, and you expose the method and it’s a total disaster.

‘Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t
Because, sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so
But, sadly, it’s true
That Hang-ups
Can happen to you.’   – Dr. Seuss

Sometimes they will spot the coin, the gimmick will fall apart in your hands, you will flash a card or maybe a heckler will expose the method half way through a trick.  These things happen to every magician. The secret is…

Don’t worry about it.

Just stay relaxed and confident and don’t ever apologize or make it a big deal. Just end the magic trick and start a new one. Perhaps with a smile and little positive joke comment. If you stop and act embarrassed, your audience will feel embarrassed too. This can express itself as either sympathy for you or they will mock you, neither of these are good!

When magic tricks go wrong, Don’t frame the error.

If you draw attention to the failed magic trick, your audience will pay more attention to it. (Pretty obvious really.) Instead, just move on and perform your next great trick. The impact of the magic tricks that follow and the magic they create will overshadow the bit of ‘nothing’ that happened between the first trick that amazed them and the next trick that impressed them.

For example: You perform a vanish using a pull and a spectator sees a flash of it flying away and comments on it. Simply say ‘oh, did I not throw it quickly enough?! I tell you what though if you reach in here and grab a card…’ By moving straight on to something else it will help blur the moment and you are away and onto another trick, no hang ups, no framing of failure or apology, just more magic tricks!

3) Minimize the chances of error.

Practice, Practice, Practice and then rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. We don’t really need to tell you this do we? Good practice doesn’t just make your magic tricks look good. It irons out the chances of failure and allows you to spot the places the magic tricks could go wrong. You can then build in ‘out’s and be relaxed enough to handle a problem should it spring up.

Do you have a story about when magic tricks go wrong? How did you deal with it? Please share the experience in the comments section below: