If You Have...
/If you have Declassified by Chris Rawlins…
Declassifed, by Chris Rawlins, is sort of an image duplication where your friend looks at a picture in a manuscript and you’re able to draw what they looked at with no questions.
What makes this particularly good is that it’s based on this legitimate document about the testing of Uri Geller. (I mean the document is “legitimate” in the sense that it’s a real thing. I’m sure whatever is written up in it is nonsense.) So it’s a drawing duplication/book test sort of hybrid that makes sense given the subject matter.
When I got my copy, I liked it a lot, but I didn’t think it was something I’d be likely to use. In casual situations it’s difficult to bring out some interesting object and then just hope that people aren’t too interested to look closely at it (as this isn’t something that can be examined).
But I had an idea that allows this to be used in close-up, casual performances.
You bring out the document and explain what it is, flipping through it, showing the different pages and images throughout. You have your friend look at an image, and then you read their mind or predict it or whatever.
At this point, the manuscript is at peak interest for the other person. If they’re going to want to look at it closely, this is the point where they will.
“Can I look at that?” they ask.
“Sure,” you go to hand them the document. “Actually… what is it you want to see? I have a bunch of my personal notes in here. I’d rather you not see them because I might want to use them for something in the future. Is there something in particular you wanted to see?”
You now flip through the document again, showing them the pages, reinforcing the idea they could have looked at dozens of images.
The idea being that you’ll let them get a brief glimpse at the document, but you don’t want to let them look through it fully because you’ve made some “notes” in there that aren’t meant for other people to see.
Of course, you’ll want to add some actual notes to the document to go along with this story.
While, in an ideal situation you would be able to just had them the document, I think this justification makes perfect sense within the storyline of the effect. You got a copy of this document so you could learn about these techniques. You made some notes in the document as you studied it. You don’t necessarily want those notes to be seen by someone else.
You can then tell them you’ll send them a pdf of the full document if they want to read through the contents more closely.
If you have Superimpose by Craig Petty…
I’ve had a couple of people ask me if I had any thoughts on how to present this trick. Specifically, how to clarify or contextualize the ending, where the selected cards “superimpose” themselves onto the aces.
I think the best idea is to play it off as some kind of mistake in the execution of the magic. You intended to transport the cards a second time, but you F’d up while reconstituting the selections between the aces and you got everything jumbled together.
Like when Jeff Goldblum’s DNA got mixed up with that fly in The Fly.
Craig may suggest this angle in the instructions, I don’t know. (Not the fly angle, but the angle of presenting it as something going wrong.)
Often, when you don’t have a good rationale for why something happens or why you would want something to happen, presenting it as a magical mistake is a good way to keep the impossibility and not have to deal with the incoherence of the premise.
Think of the classic (?) Milk to Lightbulb effect. If your presentation is just, “I can make milk go to a lightbulb,” it sounds like you went to the Mad Libs School of Random Impossibilities. But if you make milk disappear and say you’ll make it reappear in a glass across the room, there is a logic to that premise. And if—mistakenly—the milk ends up filling a lightbulb in a lamp between you and the target glass, you now have a “mistake” that fully contextualizes the effect.
The premise doesn’t make sense if it’s intentional, but if it’s a mistake, it doesn’t have to make sense, and it can still be magical.
Don’t overuse this idea. You want to leave the possibility that this was really a mistake. And if you constantly use that approach, no one will believe it.