Tricks and ideas for fresh magic. Updated Fridays.
About a decade ago, on my previous blog, I wrote a post called ‘Wikreativity’. The gist: using Wikipedia’s ‘random article’ option to give your brain a random topic to stimulate your creativity (based on Random Word Stimulation). The other day, researcher/performer/all-round-good-egg Naomi Paxton posted a link to a wondrous web-page that digs into the Science...
As I’m writing this, it’s snowing outside my window. In fact, that’s the inspiration for this post. It’s an opportunistic idea to keep in your back pocket, which can add an element of, well, the elements, to your Zoom shows. You won’t be able to do it often, but when you can, it’ll be a memorable moment. The Inspiration As often happens, this idea came from...
Gaffing ordinary objects to work in tricks is part and parcel of being a magician. But occasionally, a kind coincidence crops up and you find an object which happens to be ideally suited for magic, with no alteration needed. Here’s one example I discovered recently (or rather, my kids discovered the toy, and I thought ‘Maybe I could use it in a trick’ – like I do with...
Following on from my recent post about using everyday conversations as hooks for tricks, here’s another: The Inspiration New Year’s Resolutions. It’s something that’s on many people’s minds around now. Many make them, few keep them. Which feels like a good, relatable emotional hook for a trick. The Trick Out Of This World is a great trick, yet as is often the case in...
A quick Christmas idea this week that I may have shared before, but is worth mentioning again at this time of year. As the title suggests it’s simply this: Twist Larry Becker’s classic Will The Cards Match? trick to use Christmas cracker jokes (spelling ‘Will The Jokes Match’ instead). Just hold five cracker joke slips as a packet, carefully tear them in half to separate...
Since the big shift to working from home, sales of casual clothing have apparently jumped, while sales of formal shoes have dropped. Which makes sense, since people can often only see your upper half on video calls. This got me thinking about the Anchorman image of Will Ferrell wearing a suit jacket but no pants (US ‘pants’, as in UK ‘trousers’; not UK ‘pants’...
You know when you’re chatting with friends and the subject of ESP naturally comes up? Nope, me neither. I’ve always been amused by the idea of trying to casually steer an everyday conversation round to the esoteric subject of a magic trick. I think one way we can make magic feel more current and relevant is to use more current, relevant conversations as starting points for tricks. So...
‘Object to impossible location’ routines are fab. So here’s a way to make the ‘impossible location’ even more impossible by shifting the reappearance location much further away. It’s the kind of trick you’d normally need an assistant for, but you can use this pleasingly ridiculous method instead. The Inspiration As is often the case, combining two...
I’ve always liked tricks where you guess the combination of a padlock. But I wanted a more virtual version. So I taught myself coding, infiltrated Adobe’s HQ posing as an intern called Garamond Futura, and through months of subtle persuasion, got them to include a guess-the-code feature into pdfs. Okay, enough entirely believable backstory, what am I talking about? This… The...
Don’t worry – this isn’t one of those Franken-tricks, where two simple tricks are combined into one messy monstrosity. Instead, it’s an idea for a hidden feature of David Williamson’s modern classic 51 Cards To Pocket that can be used by anyone who performs it. The Inspiration I’ve been thinking about how the reveal of the 51 cards is usually presented, i.e...
As regular readers know, I love getting inspiration from outside magic. So this week I want to share one of my favourite books. It has great ideas, great writing…just a terrible title. It’s called Rules For Aging by Roger Rosenblatt and it’s a “wry and witty guide to life”. It’s full of unconventional nuggets of wisdom, in the form of numbered rules. I’ll...
A short post about a quick realisation I had the other day (which others may also have had, but it helped me think differently, so I’m sharing it in case it’s useful). From the few clips and ebooks I’ve seen about Zoom magic shows, most seem to feature close-up or parlour tricks, with small- to medium-sized props. This makes sense, since that’s what we’re used to...
Picking. Signing. Shuffling. There are many standard actions in magic. In fact, they’re so standard that we do them without thinking. But the standard way of doing them is only one way. So how many different ways are there? It’s easy to feel like there’s a limited number. But this post was inspired by a strangely captivating video that cropped up on my feed, by Jan Hakon...
*Update* After posting this, a magician friend let me know that Kimmo Magic Shop have already had the idea of doing a superhero angle for the race prediction. Well done them! One of the downsides to inventing a lot of magic is that sometimes you’ll find you’ve reinvented the wheel. Such is life. Anyway, since they got there first with the superhero race idea, you should definitely...
New superhero blockbusters aren’t coming out any time soon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give your audience their superhero fix though magical means. The Inspiration At its simplest, creativity is sometimes described as combining two existing ideas to create a new one. So in this case, we’re combining a trick from the magic world with a hook from the movie world. The...
While book tests can be great (I do one myself), they’re often a bit dry. So let’s dive in to discover a way to make them more interesting. There’s an old saying in creative advertising (my other job, when I’m not magic-ing) that if you’re really stuck for an idea for an ad, just stick a dog in it. So, twisting that to magic, here’s my version – when it...
Whenever I see a trick that lots of different magicians perform, but with a very similar presentation, my ears prick up. Maybe it’s because, like Lady Gaga, I’m “obsessively opposed to the typical” (sadly, that’s where the likeness ends). But also because there’s good potential to come up with something interesting, since it’s a proven audience favourite...
Like many people, I’ve succumbed to a Netflix subscription during lockdown. But even when I’m taking a break from thinking about magic, I often end up thinking about magic! Recently, I’ve been working on finding a pithy way to describe my onstage persona. One evening, I went onto Netflix and… The Inspiration I noticed that almost every show is accompanied by a few...
There’s a classic comedy technique known as the ‘pull back and reveal’ (a.k.a. ‘pull back reveal’ or, in TV, the ‘reveal shot’). TV Tropes has a good summary of it here. Basically, as the name suggests, you start close in on a scene, then pull back and reveal more information, often with humorous results. And since every Zoom show is a TV show, of sorts...
Displaying playing cards in wine glasses is so classy, it makes Ron Burgundy jealous. But what if you want to show more cards, or display more of the faces with fewer distracting reflections? I was wondering this recently, while playing with A New World by Dean Dill and Michael Weber. I wanted to perform it at chest height, as I generally prefer that for Zoom shows. It got me thinking about other...
Since y’all (hey, I’m half American, just go with it) seemed to enjoy Oliver Tabor’s account of doing a stage show online, here’s another guest post about performing in these strange times. If you don’t know them, Steve Griffin and Nathan Jones are a beautifully bantering, endlessly entertaining, multiple-Edinburgh-Fringe-shows-a-day performing magic duo. I’ve...
Relax, I haven’t become a fire and brimstone preacher. This is a quick presentation idea for any trick themed around the Seven Deadly Sins. I came up with it a while back, for a trick using blank-faced cards with sins on, but I was reminded of it recently when reading Mark Elsdon’s timely ZOOMentalism, which includes a pleasingly prop-less Seven Sins routine. Whatever method you use...
Last week, I wrote about a fascinating psychology study that found that people have an intuitive scale for how hard different feats of magic are. If you missed it, check out the post (especially the diagram) as today’s post will be cover some ideas that it sparked for me when thinking about how to apply it to magic tricks. 7 Things To (Re)Consider Cups & Balls beginning: Many...
What’s more impossible? As soon as we start deciding on the order of phases in a trick, or tricks in a show, this question raises its meddlesome head (like a Scooby Doo baddie, but without the “It was you all along” unmasking). If only there was a way to skip the guesswork and get some concrete answers. Well, thankfully there is. Please give it up...
Bringing Up Baby Following my recent post about ten ways to twist the baby gag, Joe McKay kindly sent me a link to Bill Abbott’s interview with David Acer. In it, David talks about creating fresh takes on existing bits that are “familiar in form but new in concept”. Plus lots more hard-won, perfectly-put advice about what we can learn from stand-up comedy. It’s great...
While we’ve seen many Zoom shows during the pandemic, I only know of one stage magic show livestreamed from a theatre – the recent Magic at the Barn performances put on by my friend Oliver Tabor. Oliver and I go way back (we met as teenagers in Davenport Magic’s Demon Club) and I’ve always been impressed with his optimism and give-it-a-go attitude. I thought other...
I have a secret life (sort of). For 15 years, I’ve juggled two careers. When not being a magician, I’m a ‘Conceptual Copywriter’, an un-enlightening term that basically means I create ideas and write words. And in this other career, I often brainstorm – producing shed-loads of ideas, which are then whittled down to the best few. the benefits of Brainstorming...
To break up the wall-to-wall ideas, every now and then I’ll be posting updates about things I’ve been sent or projects I’m working on. But don’t worry, I’ll still be posting an idea at the same time. Oh, and yes, by adding those zeros to the title, I’m adding a hint of peril – what will happen to my system after I’ve written 9,999 updates...
How can you hand out cards for shuffling without handing them out? Jay Sankey shared his solution to this Zoom-show conundrum on a recent YouTube video (up for a limited time and since taken down, I believe). It’s good, but I wanted something that felt even more chaotic. The solution came to me while moving a box in the loft. In fact, the box was the solution. Let’s get ready to...
This small scripting tweak can make your tricks a million times better. Well, maybe not a million, but maybe 1.5 times. It was inspired by an episode of Parks & Recreation, one of my favourite sitcoms, for several reasons (ask me sometime). With a little thought, it contains oodles of techniques and ideas that can be applied to magic. The Inspiration In this case, it’s a line from Ron...
Online shows can present problems. But, as Jonah Babins has noted, they can also create opportunities. So, as an example, here’s a nice organic switch that they allow. There are a few tricks that use a hopping origami frog made from a playing card. Michael Close has one in Workers 2 (The Frog Prince), as does Scotty York in For Your Eyes Only (Froggy Goes A’Courtin). If you do any of...
Everyone could do with a holiday right now. So why not give your audience a virtual vacation, with an interactive trick you can perform over Zoom (or Skype, or Teams, or fax (ok, maybe not fax)). The Idea Use Google Earth to reveal a chosen location, so people can ‘fly’ there. The Details In case you haven’t used it recently (or ever), Google Earth isn’t magic, but it...
The constantly creative Nikola Arkane took my Reservoir Jacks idea (described here) and ran with it.
This is the result – it made me smile from ear to unsevered ear:
Oh, and if you don’t already read her blog, you should:
arkaneshop.com/news
The quantity and quality of magic she’s developing as part of her ‘Isolation Creation Station’ is really inspiring.
How to present the sub trunk illusion in a fresh way? Do it on a trampoline, with a mid-air change. Picture this… One person (who we’ll call Hayden) is tied up under a big trampoline – but safely, so they don’t get squished by the jumper above. A second person (who we’ll call Christensen) is atop the trampoline jumping around, like House of Pain. Two helpers others...
You don’t have to be Dwayne Johnson to grapple with a skyscraper. Here’s how to use a one to adapt a classic magic prop. Appearing card castles have never looked very convincing to me – too square and un-triangle-y. They look more like, well, skyscrapers. So let’s lean into that. The Prep Redecorate a card castle as a skyscraper, with some grey and black card. You’ll...
One of the things you notice when talking to other magicians is just how differently people can view the same trick. And the lens through which we see magic tricks affects what we do with them. So here’s a way that I often look at tricks when considering what to buy, develop or perform. Essentially, whenever I come across a trick, whether it’s a new release or an older routine, I ask...
“Confusion is not magic” said Ed Marlo (Kidding! Vernon, obvs). But when it comes to trick plots, how do you avoid ending up with a muddled multi-climax monstrosity? Here’s a elegantly simple way from Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of South Park fame (or intentional infamy). Watch the video (it’s under 3 minutes) then we’ll look at how to apply it to magic. Okay, so...
A classic card plot given a Tarantino-esque twist. One of the first card tricks I ever learnt was the one where the four Jacks attempt to rob a hotel (the deck). Each Jack goes to a different floor (different part of the deck), then the cops arrive and they all assemble on the roof (the top of the deck) to escape. It’s a reasonable presentation hook, but to use a phrase from Save The Cat...