talkmagic.co.uk

Hello to you all!

I was wondering what your opinions were about the public revealing of tricks. Im very new to Magic and while its taking me a long time to learn sleights and magic ettiquette, it hasnt taken me long to fall in love with magic itself!

I was recently at an IT tradeshow where there was a magician on a stand performing some card magic, so I watched for a while as he went through the ambitious card routine and a couple of other tricks until he got onto showing me a couple of tricks with the svengali deck. He then went onto give me a free svengali deck and revealed the secret to me and to others watching! he did not know i was into magic but was obviosly happy to show me how the trick worked. Now, im not complaining about recieving a free Svengali deck, my question is, is it now worth showing the decks tricks to others??! how many others know how this works now? is this something that goes on all the time?

On a second point there was a programme on at 9pm last night, Psychics uncovered which also revealed a lot of tricks. eg needle in arm, shattered glass etc

Lastly, My friend was able to find out off the internet how mr blaine achieves most of his effects plus a couple of the tricks i have performed on him.

whats your views on the above?

This is my first 'new subject' post so be kind!

Thanks

Najis

I am afraid that this is not uncommon!

The majority of us devote a great amount of time, practice and hard work as magicians to master the skills of an art that we respect and love. However, there are plenty of people out there that (obviously) want to know how the effect is achieved - thus creating windows of opportunity for the lesser 'magicians' to earn a quick buck. Whether by doing a TV special, selling the secrets on the internet or revealing methods to the public - all they are doing is harming our art and showing a lack of respect to the magicians who have dedicated time and effort to create these effects.

Some will argue that by revealing how tricks are done, this stirs the interest of the general public and forces magicians to invent newer and better methods/tricks. Personally I think this is true to a very small extent! More frequent and better quality magic programs on TV would raise the public interest. I think as magicians we are always looking for newer, better and more impossible methods to achieve effects anyway, without the revelation of our secrets!

The Balducci, for example, was one of the strongest effects in my repertoire for a lay audience. I am sure I am not alone when I say I am reluctant to perform this absolute gem of magic now after it has been exposed to death on the web and TV! The more knowledge that is given to the public, the more they THINK they know. Keeping methods within the magic community is the key to our success!

well I absolutly agree, and can definatly relate to the levitation story! However i was out in spain visiting my mum recently and ended up showing a few magic tricks to her friends followed by the levitation and they were gobsmacked! Purely because they havent had the exposure that we have here. Maybe thats a gap in the market? take an over exposed trick...overseas!

Things like the needle in arm trick which i first learned of reading on this very forum and had marked myself down to buy, i no longer really need to (well maybe the needle, you'd be a bit worried if I had one of those readily available!) as I saw clearly how the trick was done on tv last night.

When I performing I try and use as many of my own effects as possible. This means the spectator will not have seen the trick before and will not have seen it exposed!

Another good idea is to go back and check out tricks and routines from years and years ago. Chances are, your spectators will not have seen much of that material either!

In reply to the programme, I watched this too. This is very similar to The Masked Magician. You will find that the production is usually by a magic company, and the revealed secrets are very far fetched and are not the usual methods people use!
For example the "psychic" who asked the guy to point to a card and the cards were marked (this I admit I did not like the revealing of) but there are HUNDREDS of ways to achieve the same effect.
Sometimes these programmes are good to me as people say "oh I know how this is done its so and so" then you show them its not, and its double baffling!

Decent point I suppose! It just the idea of putting the concept of a DL, or force etc. in their head that is dangerous. I remember performing a virtually self-working card trick once and at the end (when the spec was totally lost!) he said to me "Nice palming." WHAT!? That is kinda my point.

We had a bit of discussion about Secerets of Psychics Revealed last year - http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic1766-0-asc-15.php and scroll down to the second posting on that page for the nitty gritty.

I’ve never been that fussed about the larger stunts being revealed as the average layman doesn’t often have the required heard of camels and fork lift truck readily at hand. The thing that does annoy me though is the smaller stuff such as the cards mentioned originally, or in my case with coin magic, things like a sh…..
Not that I’ve ever vanished an aeroplane but surely everyone knows its some elaborate apparatus that achieves the effect even if they don’t know what it is. When I vanish a coin in my hand however the general consensus is that its down to my skill at misdirection and palming and I’m quite happy to let everyone carry on believing that.
I’m sure that to a certain degree an audience appreciates the skills of the performer who has obviously sacrificed many hours to become that good, much like a golf fan watching Tiger Woods for instance. I think both magician and audience would feel slightly let down though if they were to find out I play golf badly but I’m a good liar and cheater.

its all really interseting, anyway I wonder how many lay people would actually remember how the trick is done in 6 months time? actually.... probably quite a few if sky keep repeting the damn programmes!

Hello there,

I think revelation is the enemy of magic, so it is in our interest to misdirect the spec as much as possible. For instance, I'm not known as a "mentalist", but as someone who exploits interesting psychological quirks. In the minds of the specs, it's just a matter of how much more I know about naturally-occuring phenomena than they do. In the minds of some, witches and witchcraft have become updated to become psychology and advanced thought. This is fair enough, because all I want is for them to believe something weird is going on. They conjure the rest all by themselves.

For instance, as an opener, I have a nice body language routine where I give a bit of patter about how days of the week mean different things and come across in their non-verbals. I give someone a callendar and ask them to pick a random date, think about the day of the week upon which it falls, before calling out just the date. I tell them the day of the week. We repeat it and I ask them to stay stony faced to make it more difficult. I repeat it a few times with other specs with about 90% accuracy.

Corinda has a hellish formula but I can't really do mental arithmetic (and certainly not mental division, which is why I came up with this trick!). By my method, getting it right 90% of the time promotes the idea that it's real. Encouraging specs to take the callendar and try it on each other gives a 1:7 chance of their success too. Someone's bound to be lucky and get two or even three right. My God! They must be gifted!

On a subconscious level, the idea that this is just a friendly demonstration of things the specs may be able to do themselves leads them into a more compliant and suggestible state. It is a form of mild hypnotic induction, if you will. After four or five effects to deepen this state, I can just do "straight" magic but suggest it's done using really deep psychological stuff if I think it will keep the wonder levels up. By this point, many spec's critical faculties simply can't tell the difference between psychology and traditional effects in line with their original belief in something weird happening.

Oh, that reminds me: At a friend's house last Friday night, one person helped the whole thing along immensely by saying that she'd decided to ban me from "playing with" her mind after a particularly emotional "un en avant" effect I pulled on her the week before! A sea of worried faces! My favourite! As Michael Howard might say in a sinister tone: "It's alright, I'm not going to hurt you... this time".