talkmagic.co.uk

magic, isnt all about cheating you know. How can it be, when your audiences know that what's happening is somehow all down to the performer? A fact that quite a few magicians seem to forget.
If your audience catch you out... It's because you have done something wrong. The timings gone wrong, or the misdirections failed, or the sleights been botched... ect.

Now, how to stop this from happening?

Simples. Make sure that when you perform, you do it in such a way that the audience doesnt give a flying fig about the method. They are captivated by the performer,and lost in the moment.

daleshrimpton wrote:magic, isnt all about cheating you know. How can it be, when your audiences know that what's happening is somehow all down to the performer? A fact that quite a few magicians seem to forget.
If your audience catch you out... It's because you have done something wrong. The timings gone wrong, or the misdirections failed, or the sleights been botched... ect.

Now, how to stop this from happening?

Simples. Make sure that when you perform, you do it in such a way that the audience doesnt give a flying fig about the method. They are captivated by the performer,and lost in the moment.

Dale's post should be sticky'd - it sums it all up really, take note!

It has been said several times already, out is all about the effect. Personally I don't like the stuff using camera's. However if we weren't magicians and were watching something it would be to be entertained, what would be their response if they were entertained and didn't know how the effect was achieved? The world of entertainment is not black and white it is full of grey areas. The people who trend to care about the how's are the people who do the entertaining and they have their own reasons for why they believe what is right or wrong. They are right in having their own views of what's right our wrong because there is no right or wrong as long as people were entertained.

Magic is just lying with style.

I do magic therefore I cheat, lie and deceive. And, hopefully, entertain by doing so.

This is another one of those issues where you sort of "feel" the right answer.

For me, I think the benchmark is whether a trick can be done in the same way (or more accurately "seemingly in the same way") to someone who is not a "proper" stooge. So, no camera tricks, no dressing up crew members in similar clothes to actual bystanders and creating misleading impressions of what happened, and no direct stooging.

Helpers, assistants and the like are all fine, but I wouldn't feel happy about getting a mate to pretend he doesn't know me and name the six of clubs when asked to think of any card. Magic involves acting, lying and cheating, but that is just lying/cheating/acting; there's no magic there.

I appreciate the arguments that the effect is king, but just as a magician is a person who entertains with magic (and not merely be "an entertainer") a magic trick requires magic, or else what you have is a piece of theatre. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not magic, is it?

This brings to mind a chapter from Hiding The Elephant. I forget the names (and the book is upstairs, stairs are hard) but it mentions a play in which one of the characters is a wizard who baffles other characters in the play with magic and at one point in the play his biggest naysayer in the plot is involved in checking that the wizard's hat is empty after showing it to the audience, and immediately after the wizard places it on the table and produces a plant from under it.

Magicians in the audience were stunned and couldn't figure it out so they asked the actor back stage how it was done and he said "The banker put it there when he checked it."

The audience never twigged that the banker's hatred of the wizard was just part of the character. To all intents and purposes it was a magical duo doing the work, yet one of them was placed above suspicion merely by characterization. Not EXACTLY a stooge but it does blur the line.

-Stacy

Thanks for the comments, it's an interesting subject and I guess as many have said you just have to go with your own instinct but as for camera tricks, I just think it's daft.

This was discussed a while back. I'm sure there is more than one thread on the subject, but here's one I started a few years back. It doesn't seem like anything has changed since then.

Karma wrote:Thanks for the comments, it's an interesting subject and I guess as many have said you just have to go with your own instinct but as for camera tricks, I just think it's daft.

we have to remember that it was a magician, who invented camera tricks in the first place.

And therefore in part, the magicians are just claiming back the right to over crank the camera.

What is daft, is over using said technology.

I also recall David Nixon openly using television effects on his magic box. He called it electrickery, and demonstrated some of the more visual things that could be done with Chromakey.
One i vividly remember, was David turning Mrs Mills into a mermaid, and having her floating around in a glass box.
Mrs mills was a large lady.
Its funny how some things stick in the memory isnt it.

daleshrimpton wrote:I also recall David Nixon openly using television effects on his magic box. He called it electrickery, and demonstrated some of the more visual things that could be done with Chromakey.
One i vividly remember, was David turning Mrs Mills into a mermaid, and having her floating around in a glass box.
Mrs mills was a large lady.
Its funny how some things stick in the memory isnt it.

And never forget the ground breaking Rentaghost!

daleshrimpton wrote:we have to remember that it was a magician, who invented camera tricks in the first place.

And therefore in part, the magicians are just claiming back the right to over crank the camera.

Film is just an illusion of movement based on a series of rapidly changing still images.
The first Image projectors are called 'magic lanterns'
Seeing moving pictures for the first time must have seemed like real magic [or should that be reel magic ?]

Also, movie special effects aren't seen as cheating. We know when FX are being used, most of the time, but we still enjoy them - possibly all the more when we don't know how it's done.

I go by the method of practicing the natural as Vernon would put it. If you were to top palm, you practice making your regular squaring motion have good timing and then work on making your top palm look exactly like you're just squaring the deck. (though you SHOULD have a logical reason to reach over and square the deck.). The same can be said for the Spread Cull and other moves like DL and a TC.