Mailbag #24
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This email was in regards to the post A Story With No End
It may be just semantics, but I think that a magic trick begins and ends, but experiences can feed on itself and keep on going.
It can be a magic trick, a movie, a meal, it all has an end, but sometimes the impact is big enough to create something that will last. And then things in our daily lives can trigger the memory to recall the experience.
A movie exists on film, but your Jurassic Park is not the same as mine, to me it is connected to a bunch of nerds pointing to the screen during the session and screaming "this is a Mac, why use one to run Unix?"
So maybe the end of mystery of the trick will not end the experience, it will just change it. —IK
The point you’re making here is a semantic one. But the point I was attempting to make wasn’t a semantic one, it was a practical one. So let me clarify it.
Let’s not complicate it by thinking of a professional magic show, which obviously has a start and an end. Let’s just think of a casual situation where you show someone a trick.
When does the trick end?
You could say the trick is over at the climax of the effect. That as soon as you turn over their card, the trick has ended. But that seems like a strange way to think of things: that the very start of the emotion we’re trying to elicit is the end of the thing we’re doing.
Or—as I choose to think of it—you could say that as long as the person is fooled by the trick, the trick is ongoing.
When viewed from that perspective, it makes sense to not just perfect the sleights and the method that leads up to the climax, but also to take practical steps to maintain the mystery after the climax of an effect.
Do you have any focus-group testing results coming up? —DT
There are about a half-dozen different things that were in some stage of testing when the coronavirus came along and put off testing indefinitely. I’m not sure when that will pick up again, unfortunately.
One of the most interesting things to me that we were looking at was in regards to how people perceive “spectator as mind reader” types of effects. For example, let’s say you’re doing a trick with a thumb-writer and a two digit-number. Which of these is stronger:
“I’ve written down my prediction of what two-digit number you’ll think of.”
vs.
“I’ve written down a two digit number. I want you to read my mind and tell me what number it is.”
I found the feedback we got on that very interesting. We were about 2/3rds of the way through what we wanted to do with that testing, but I may call it off early and just publish what we have if it looks like we’re not going to be getting groups of strangers together anytime soon.
Any testing results will likely be in the supporter-only publications, since they’re the ones who fund the testing.
I’m working on an idea to use a coin vanish in the middle of a “failed” effect as a tribute to [insert otherworldly entity] to bring to effect to conclusion or as the imp for another effect.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on ditching objects after a vanish. A lot of times I see the advice to just hold it in classic palm or whatever until after the effect is complete or there is an off moment. But I feel like if you don’t clearly show that hand to be empty then that leaves an “easy answer” as to what happened.
I think this may be another instance of spectators being too polite to actually say “uh, it’s in your other hand”. Kind of similar to the card to pocket problem. —JC
The best advice I can give (and maybe this is too obvious to even be considered “advice”) is to try and structure the routine so that you ditch the object before it has been revealed to have vanished (or changed, or whatever the case may be).
So: false transfer, ditch, reveal the coin is gone—not—false transfer, reveal the coin is gone, ditch.
The particular trick you have in mind might not allow that to happen, but I feel like, more often than not, you can structure things to allow for this type of ditch.
Your question brought to mind something else I want to talk about, but that will be a longer discussion for tomorrow’s post: Tuning Spectators.