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Here's my new video called Time Travel Theory
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=26mPP1Eb-5E

all i see is an ambitious card with different story :\

Okay, since you are a professional magician I'm going to be brutally honest with you. From one professional to another, I'm sure that you will appreciate everything that I have to say and that you will be able to make good use of my constructive criticisms.

Right off the top, I like your patter. I appreciate that you've taken an ACR and dressed it up to be something a bit different. While the whole time travel idea isn't new, your presentation fits what you are explaining and you are accomplishing your goal - you have set a theory and you are showing that your theory works. Well done.

Now, let's suppose for a moment that this was real - not sleight of hand. Damn, wouldn't that be exciting? Not only that, but you are the guy who came up with it...Even more exciting, no? Well, get excited dammit. You are not monotone and that's a good thing, but your excitement doesn't match the breakthrough that you've made in the scientific area of time travel.

During the explanation phase, soft-pedalling is alright. But, when the magic happens, you need to increase your enthusiasm. The thing about excitement and enthusiasm - it is infectuous.

Your strike double is very good. At 56 seconds, though, your get ready is obvious. Instead of placing the card down then doing the get ready, simply leave your pinky in the way and you will be automatically set to go, with no get ready needed.

Your get ready for the queen to four color change is also a bit sketchy. Work on that one. Problem with video, though, is that I cannot look at your face and the fact of the matter is, in real time, this may not be any bit of a problem at all. If this is the case, then disregard this comment.

On a side note, it is good to see that you use that color change, because I was not impressed with your color change video. The fact that you can show color change after color change means nothing unless it is in the context of a routine - which you prove quite nicely that you are capable of taking those technical sleights and applying them. Good deal!

Your strip out/switch immediately following (don't know the name of this particular sleight) is excellent.

Your tilt needs serious work. Your pinky should not be under the card when doing this. The card is held up by the pinky (along with the other fingers on its gentle slope down to the deck), but all fingers should be on the side and fully visible to your spectators. Holding the deck in such a position also helps to mask it from the side, which is the bad angle for the tilt. So, get your pinky out from underneath the card when executing the tilt - it isn't a pinky break, it's a tilt.

The load on move (just after 3 minutes) gives a bit of a peek of the cards being loaded. Not a big deal, really, it would pass most any spec. But, you are a bit too fiddley with it overall. You need a bit more practice to smooth it out. Not a big thing, you've got it down, now you just need to smooth it out.

Also, I think you could stand to remove one of the phases. I can't say which one, you've fused them all very nicely together. But, taking a phase out would serve to tighten it up a bit and quite possibly strengthen the overall routine by so doing.

One last thing...This just seems to come to a stop. You need some kind of finale, something to really set the whole thing off. You have a good routine, with a bit more practice and some real audience time it will be a strong routine, but you need a finale to make it a powerful routine. This may require a re-working of the entire beginning to set up for the finale, but this will come down to you and what you want to do.

Overall though, it's a good routine, well thought out and very nice.

Mike.

Edited in: I posted this during the previous poster's writing...I disagree with the comment. Yes, this is a different twist on a classic ACR, but the use of two cards in the beginning changes it a bit and shows excellent creativity. Further, the flat comment, "all i see is an ambitious card with different story" has no constructive value at all.

Another edit: I just got to thinking...

Isn't two cards going back in time a bit stronger than one card? What if you rearranged this to start with one card then move onto doing two cards?

I mean, if you've just demonstrated that you can replace two cards via time travel, then doing just one card seems to be an anticlimax.

Could you do this with one card first (the last half) then do it with the two (the first half)?

What do you think?

I think the wording of the patter needs fair a bit of refinement. More short, snappy phrases would go some way towards making it sound more dramatic.

But on a more fundamental level, your terminology is wrong. The effect has nothing to do with time travel as the term is generally understood. If you sent a pack of cards back in time, then the pack of cards arriving from the future would first pop into existence, and then the original pack would pop out of existence (i.e. vanish) as it is sent back to the past. In between, you would have two packs of cards. No, by all the conventions of science fiction, this is not time travel at all but rather time erasure. What you're doing is deleting a few seconds of the pack's history so that it is as though those seconds never existed. Time erasure is not as common in science fiction as time travel, but it does crop up from time to time (ahem). One fairly common use for it is as a method of execution in which the criminal's entire life is deleted from history.

When I was watching the first part of the trick, one of my thoughts was that turning one of the cards around in order to represent the rewinding of the pack's history doesn't make any sense at all. And indeed it doesn't, but the spectator does need something visual to associate with the rewinding of time. It occured to me that you could rewind the pack's history by means of a tap wrench like this.



You could place the pack on a table, then hold the tap wrench on the cards, and then turn the handle and erase five ... ten ... fifteen seconds of the pack's history. But for the second part of the trick, with the colour change, the tap wrench idea obviously won't work. I still think it would improve the first half, but then afterwards you would need to explain that you can actually do it with mental energy alone although it is rather exhausting.

But you know what, for the second part of the trick it also doesn't work particularly well to rewind time by a specified number of seconds as you do. The problem is that there never WAS a moment in time at which the four was face-up on top of the deck and the queen was sticking out of the middle, face-down. So how can you send the deck of cards back to a moment in its history that never occured in the first place?

To make the effect work in a way that is consistent with the time manipulation premise, you need to at some point have the cards arranged as near as possible to EXACTLY the way they will look immediately after the colour change. That is, the queen is sticking out the middle and the four is being held face-up just above the pack. At that point, inform the spectator that right now is the moment in the history of the cards to which you will send them back.

I tend to agree with Michael that the third and final segment of the trick is an anti-climax. But imagine you liked my idea of using a tap wrench for the first part. Then you now have a tap wrench in which fifteen seconds of time is stored. What happens when those fifteen seconds are discharged? I imagine that it would make some object suddenly become fifteen seconds older (i.e. time is accelerated). What magical effect could you use to demonstrate this? I don't know, but it's something to think about.

Edit: I don't know how much science fiction or fantasy you read, but you would do well to immerse yourself in the literature for research purposes. For a start, there are some bits in Terry Pratchett's "Thief of Time" that might be useful as a tool to help you think about the possibilities of time manipulation.

Not sure about the tap wrench - but I thought of a possible premise to build the routine on. It may also give you a finale, if you're so inclined.

Although completely different in execution, I have used a "time travel" routine where I have the spectator turn the hands of their own watch back and forth as the routine moves along. This may or may not be a good idea given the length of time your routine takes, but it's something that you could think about.

Using the spec's wrist watch, you can also work in a finale of traveling back to a time before you even began - where you folded a card and placed it under the spectator's watch (naturally, the routine ends with a card under watch closing).

As for the bits and pieces of the routine, Michael has said all that really needs to be said on technique. I agree that this routine has some great foundations - and with more practice and refinement, it will be a powerful bit of business.

One note - your load at 3 minutes (which Michael pointed out), there is an incredibly easy workaround for this - if you're interested pm me for details.

Outstanding work - keep at it and keep polishing. You have a winner, here.