performing magic Archives

The Pitfalls of Performing Magic Tricks for Your Family and Friends

It’s a cruel trick of nature.. Those that need the most practice and experience

have the least opportunity to receive it.

Those pesky professional magicians, they have hordes of new people to show their magic tricks to every night. Not only that, but they get paid to do it! What about those of us that are starting out, or simply prefer to treat magic as a hobby? How are we supposed to get better if we don’t have access to an ever changing audience to sharpen our classic pass’s on? The answer… our family and friends.

How to bore friends and annoy people

Your friends may love your magic tricks. You may always be asked to show them a trick or about how your magic is going. Being a magician is quite unusual, and you are probably the only magician your friends know. However, many of your friends, and most of your family knew you before you started to learn magic. They like you because.. Well, you’re you! Hanging around with you is not a license for you to constantly show them your latest tricks, or even worse, each stage of development that your current favorite trick has reached. They haven’t decided to go and see a magic show every time they see you, so make sure you don’t ‘magic them to death’

71% of magicians partners reported that they no longer like being shown magic tricks. (Source: Feedback survey MagicShop.co.uk 2009 (Sample size 627)

Pick the right times to show them some magic. Wait to be invited to do so. Thinking that because you have a ‘relationship’ with someone, it’s fair game to make them watch endless card tricks, is a sure fire way to bore and annoy your friends and family. So who do you show your magic to? If you don’t perform to the public, your friends and family are your only audience. However, it’s really easy to avoid these pitfalls. You just need to keep in mind some simple advice.

The dynamic’s are different

The dynamics of performing magic to people who know you is very different to that of the general public. You already have a relationship with these people. Basically, they know you aren’t really magical. This gives them far fewer boundaries than someone who knows you only as a magician, there to entertain. This expresses itself in may different ways. Here are just a few:

They ask more questions
They will grab at props
They try to get the ‘secret’ out of you
They don’t regard you as a professional
They want you to repeat the tricks

Be yourself

Another challenge when performing for people that know you, is that persona’s simply don’t work.
Suddenly switching to the character of a wild west hustler, or a mystic from the middle east, comes across as ridiculous. Your friend may have known you at school or has sat through several dull business meetings with you earlier that week. When you show them a trick and switch personalities to become someone else, it just doesn’t work. The only authentic style you can present these people, is one that fit’s with their knowledge about you. Basically, you have to be yourself!

Doing it right

We have written a free ebook that discusses the pitfalls of performing magic for your family and friends. The book gives you practical ways to:

Improve your presentation
Deal with ‘grabbers’
How to answer ‘ Do another one’
Being the center of attention
How not to reveal the ‘secrets’

The free ebook, written by professional magicians also gives you tips and techniques on the approach, character and timing.

Do you have some advice for magicians performing magic tricks for their family and friends? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below:

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: