Mailbag #97
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You recently mentioned that long tutorials aren’t necessarily a good thing. I just saw a phenomenal example of that.
Craig Petty’s new release “Cube 52” is boasting a 9-hour video download. This is a good thing? I am overwhelmed just thinking about having to wade through 9 hours of video to find a decent trick. That’s a whole work day. Ridiculous. —MH
One time, I was in a long-ish distance relationship with a girl who lived in the Poconos, a couple of hours from where I was living in New York City. We were driving together through her small town and there was a sign on the side of the road. Not quite as big as a billboard, but still a very large sign that was clear from the road. It said:
See
Candles
Being
Made
I turned to my girlfriend and said, “That sounds like a punishment.”
I feel the same way when I hear, “Nine-hour instructional video.”
Look, the three volume Paul Harris Stars of Magic videos managed to perform and teach 37 wildly different tricks in less than 3 and a half hours.
I understand the impulse is to provide as much value as possible, but what about for the people that value their time?
These are cards with a Rubik’s cube back design and different colored faces.
There are apparently a lot of different things that can be done with these cards. But I would love an edited version of the instructions. Yes, I realize I could probably watch the first 45 minutes and get the basic ideas. But I don’t want the basic ideas, I want the best ideas. I want Craig to tell me from his experience what are the most powerful tricks. Which are the few that he is regularly performing the most?
I realize everyone’s hearts are in the right places with these long downloads. “Let’s give them all the ideas we have, and the history of the effect, and some unedited chit-chat about the trick, and multiple live performances of the same effect.” How can you complain about getting more? Especially when the hobby of magic is evolving to be less and less about performing for people and more about talking to other magicians about magic—on podcasts, and YouTube videos, and Facebook groups, and Discords. For most people, these long downloads are probably giving them what they want.
And if I were to fall in love with the trick, then sure, give me 9 hours to really savor all the ideas. But usually I’m in the mode that I just want to get out there and perform. Give me the Pareto Principle version of these downloads. Give me the essentials. I don’t need the deep cuts.
Re: Neo-Techniques
I understand very much where you want to get, and the double lift approach is good, but in the shuffling case not so much. The reason being is that they ARE capable of turning the top card of a deck, so its a matter of mimicking how a normal person does it. But they are NOT capable of shuffling a deck (and they know it), so in this case if we want to convey a shuffled deck, we cant mimic them. —BM
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t fully agree. When people say they can’t shuffle, they mean just that, that they can’t shuffle. Because to them, “shuffling” often means the riffle shuffle with the waterfall, or something like that.
But if you said, “Can you mix these cards up?” They wouldn’t say, “Oh no, I’m incapable of that.” Because they can mix the cards. And that’s what we want them to believe. That the cards are “mixed” into an unknown state.
So, I believe it makes sense to make your mixing look like something your spectator would do or could do.
If people can relate to what you’re doing, they will be more amazed when the outcome surpasses anything that they could have made happen themselves. If you’re doing a one-handed shuffle with a waterfall (to take it to the extreme) then you are already doing something they can’t relate to, so the impossibility of the ending is lessened.
When you see a 6’10” athletic guy do an incredible dunk, it might be impressive, but it’s not unbelievable. But if some 5’6” chubby slob who looked like you took off from the foul-line and slammed it through the hoop, you would be shocked and amazed.
Whenever I can, I want to keep my handling of the props as familiar as possible to people so that the climax really feels wholly unexpected.
Re: The discussion of secret writing in Mailbag #94
I think the best way to disguise secret writing is to add another method to the trick that gets you the information you need to write _before_ the spectator thinks you have it, then pretend you have written it, but secretly write it _after_.
Simple example: someone picks any card; you thumbwrite the value on a business card; then reveal it
Disguised: Someone pushes any card out of a face down, marked deck. You read the value: Ace of Hearts. Pick up your business card and say “Before you did that, I predicted Ace of Hearts. Let’s see what you got." While they are turning over the card, you secretly write AH on the card and drop it on the table.
Among other things, this takes all the heat off the writing, because once you say the name of the predicted card, all attention turns to the card on the table. —PM
Yup, absolutely. If you can combine different techniques in your secret writing, you can remove the idea of secret writing altogether.
I have a friend who does this with WikiTest. He puts a folded business card on the table at the start of the effect and covers it with a glass. The person searches their word, and my friend writes it on a second (pre-folded and unfolded) business card in his lap. Then he can talk about a premonition he had the night before, and he wrote a word down a word on that business card. “For some reason, last night I was getting a clear vision of a groundhog. Is that what you were thinking of?”
While they react, he can casually remove the glass and unfold the business card, switching it in for the one he wrote in his lap.
By combining three deceptions: the WikiTest app, secret writing, and a billet switch, he has something truly impenetrable. (ABCM, as I said long ago.) Not only that, but all these methods take the weight off each other. Secret writing, when they believe the writing is already isolated somewhere, is easy to get away with. A billet switch that happens after the climax of a trick (after the word has been revealed) does not need to even be very good to get away with it. And the only “answer” to WikiTest (“somehow he must have seen what I searched”) is eliminated when you apparently wrote it the night before.