talkmagic.co.uk

yes, yes...that made you look didn't it...

well, here it is folks...100% genuine as promised...

quite possible blindingly obvious advice, but it's still worth saying:

"revisit your old books and dvds"...do not buy new stuff...

i've found from my first year or two of studying, i initially dismissed alot of effects cos they were either not "me", or just too difficult...and i''ve found that these effects have deleted themselves from my mind entirely...when i re-read my books, i still skim over the ones i once ignored...

so, take this as a gentle reminder to re-read properly all your books, something might leap out and grab you this time round...or at least, with a little more experience under your belt, give you the knowledge to take an idea and play around with it to suit your way of performing...

i started over the weekend, and i've found a possible half dozen effects i now like, that i previously dismissed...

so there you go, save your money for a month or so, and genuinely re-investigate your old books and dvds, notepad in hand and spend a little time contemplating each effect through properly...

it's well worth the extra time and investment...

Very good post. I did a similar thing a few weeks ago and found a load of tricks that I originally thought were way too obvious. But now that my presentation on the whole is far better than when I started, these tricks with some small modifications are suddenly very good.

Also, it's good to find old tricks and add your own or more modern twists to them so that the basic working is the same but the end effect becomes something different.

Totally true......

I have at times stumbled into something I once considered to be worthless to me....but as you progress as a performer, things once too hard are not any longer.....things that once didn't get you a reaction, now do as you are a better "performer"......old patter can be changed to be more relavant.......you might even find that they just even get the old creative juices flowing and help you develop some new material for yourself.

Absolutely!

When I have nothing to do (rare), I dip into a magic book at random and study a random effect. If you think about it, they're all there for a reason and even if you don't use that particular effect as is, it's still the starting point for your own imagination to get weaving. Hence my liking for books, because I can scribble my own thoughts in the margins. When you strip away the effects, some of the underlying mechanisms are amazingly ingenious and yet they're stuck in some corner of a book when they could go for £10+ on their own. Some of them, I think, could be said to be truly beautiful, too.

there was an effect in Scarne on Card Tricks (the red cover one with yellow text if thats not the title!) - one of the first ones in it, where you predict each card in a deck whilst someone notes down your predictions and they all fit at the end...

a very fine effect, one i dismissed when i first started, purely for no real reason at all, perhaps i wanted to "prove my worth" by learning something technically harder...when i didnt realise its the framing and performance that was the most important thing in the first place...

RRTCM, Scarne's and Annemann's...you have an entire career's worth there - all for £22 or so...

I'm even taking two days off this week to re-discover some of my earlier books that were too hard at the time, yet i never reconsidered the dismissed effects...

great post...could it be you have just discovered a treatment for the dreaded C.U.P.S

Yes...I believe he has...

I have also come up with a solution to CUPS,

Go out, buy everything from NUMS, Ellusionist, and Themagicwarehouse...make it so that there is nothing more you could possible want out there...and look, No more CUPS!


...Of course though...there is the fact that your house and car might be gone a week later when the bill comes in .

I sadly find very little time now to do anything but magic, and not enough time for it. I have not even (in two weeks if not a little bit more) gone through volume 1 of Art of Astonishment...I am on here way too much I suppose in all honesty... .

How do you all manage this huge forum? I have found that I spend at least a good 3 hours on here once a day just to get through all of the new posts. Do you all just look at the first post, see if you are interested, and if not move on to the next? Skip the topic completely if the title does not suit you? Or read everything like I have since I have joined?

Anyway, very good advice and this Winter Vacation (December 23rd I believe until January 2nd) I will try and get through Art of Astonishment volumes 1-2 and maybe some other things.

Oh and "buy" the way, talking about CUPS...well...check out my post under CUPS... .

~David