Dustings #59

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This gets my vote for worst magic trailer of the year. Thoughts? —RE

Well… hmmmm. The trailer is nicely shot and put together professionally. So in that sense it’s fine. But I’m not sure that’s what we care about from magic trailers.

I’m not someone who is super interested in puling a shish kebab skewer (or whatever) out of my finger, so I sent this along to a virtual focus group of 20 people and asked these questions.

What is the trick supposed to be?

Were you fooled by the trick?

What is your best guess as to how the trick is done?

18 people responded. They all seemed to understand the idea of the trick. Three of them said they were fooled. And all of them had the same or similar “best guess” that involved him hiding the stick behind his hand (either during a cut or when the hand goes off screen). So based on what we see in the trailer, everyone had a reasonable explanation for how it was done. So I guess that would qualify it as not a good trailer.

Obviously if seeing this in real life, they would have to come up with some other explanation because you can’t cut or “go off screen” in the real world. But we don’t really know what this might look like in the real world, so there’s no way to judge.

As a magician, if I wanted to perform this trick, the important thing for me would be to have some idea of what it looks like in a real performance. How much freedom of movement do I have? How easy is it to get into the trick? This trailer addresses none of that. You have one choppy demonstration in the forest, and then one that was apparently shot in a cavern during a solar eclipse. If the goal is to sell me on a trick, that does the opposite. It suggests no confidence in what this trick might look like in the real world.

(If the people behind this trick want to link me to an uncut, real-world performance, I’d be happy to post it here. I’m here to help!)

That’s why, even though the production value is considerably lower, I much prefer this trailer for Marcus Eddie’s similar effect, Splinter.

At least that tells me what I’m getting.

Okay, I need your help. I’ve found myself using the word “magical” more often on this site and I can’t really tell if it’s accurate writing or lazy writing.

What I’m trying to describe is a quality of certain effects where the response goes beyond “How did he do that?” and is more like, “How could this be possible?”

There’s an otherworldliness to the “magical” feeling. It’s not just something you feel in your head, it’s in your whole body.

I think there are three responses to magic in general. An audience can be left:

  • feeling entertained

  • feeling fooled

  • with a magical feeling

Not just one of these, of course. They can feel each thing to a different extent.

However, almost all of our time, effort, and discussion in magic is spent on how to fool people to greater degrees.

Then, a smaller percentage of “more evolved” performers are thinking about how to be more entertaining with their fooling.

But hardly anyone is talking about the dreamy, romantic, mystifying, “magical” feeling that certain tricks/presentations can generate. I get the impression some people think that if you just fool people hard enough that will somehow get them to that “magical” feeling. But I don’t think the two things are necessarily related.

Anyways, while a lot of the stuff I’ve written has been my attempt to come up with ways to target the magical feeling, I’ve only recently started thinking about it in this specific way. And I’m wondering if there’s a better word to be using than “magical.” If you have thoughts, let me know.

Thanks for those of you who’ve sent me some bad forces as per my last post.

Here’s a nice bad one to get your audience to think card forces are dumb . Your force card is on top. You cut the deck into 6 piles and form them into a line with the top pile third from one of the ends. Then you use the Hot Rod force to force that pile and turn over the top card. In this case you would actually hope to get a number you have to spell, as that makes the force dumber.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting you teach this to someone out of the blue. I’m suggesting you do something where you reference a trick you’re “working on” or an “earlier version” of a trick you want to show them at some point. Then you demonstrate the trick and in the place of a good force, you use a shitty one. Which then gets exposed/taught when you break down the effect for them. (See the previous post and the posts linked within it to further clarify this idea.)

You want it to seem as if this is the type of thing you’d do to force a card. That way, later when you say, “Okay, just touch any card for me,” that will feel like something entirely different and free and normal.

Can someone explain the number of retweets on this tweet?

I mean, clearly they’re not legit, but I’m just wondering where they came from (and where they’ve gone to). I can only assume someone bought some fake retweets as a goof (or because they really think I have a Twisting the Aces presentation). Then those accounts got douched out by twitter, but still the number of retweets remains? I don’t really give a shit either way. Just curious.