Echo Sync

Note: From Marc Kerstein who writes about this update:

The two things that probably need to be communicated for the new update is that there’s a new setting the user needs to set to “Realistic” to enable the fancy new UI stuff, and as I’ve made the drawings better, the user will need to remake their drawings in Drawing Switch and Draw Cycle.

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[The person who recorded the clips below asked me to alter his voice. He later told me he was kidding. But that was after I’d modified the clips. So now you get the sweet sultry tones of James Earl Jones performing magic.]

Echo Sync is a new feature in the Jerx App that’s being released tomorrow.

It’s a utility feature that allows all sorts of performances that you can frame as mind-reading, influence, spectator as mind-reader, etc.

Here’s a simple example.

You hold your hand behind your back and ask your friend to name a number between one and five. She says two. You pull out your hand and you have two fingers extended. “Impressive,” you say. Then you repeat it. She says four, and you pull out your hand with four fingers extended. “You’re amazing…. What? You’re not buying this?”

You pull out your camera and have them turn their back to you…

You can do with as many numbers as you want in a row, they’ll always get it right.

This is Echo Sync.

Here’s how it works. You go in the app and click the Echo Sync feature. This brings you to your camera. You hit record on your camera and the audio starts recording. Five seconds after (or less than that, depending on your settings) the video starts recording. Then, when you click stop, the whole thing gets exported to your camera roll, except the start of the video is shifted back to the start of the audio, and stitched together in the process.

This gives you a five second head-start on anything your spectator says.

Here’s another example, where the performer has told his friend he’s going to try to mentally project a nonsense word to her…

You don’t need a Ouija board for this. You can just draw the letters in the air behind their back.

What else can you do?

Finally, a use for that dumb card index you bought.

Or maybe you activate a pressure point on their scalp that stimulates predictive abilities and—so long as they can focus and eliminate distractions—they always know what will beat your throw in Rock Paper Scissors.

You can write words and numbers on a whiteboard that they can pick up.

You can have them focus and name any word that comes to mind, then send them the recording. When they check the video when they get home, they see you making some hand signals before they named their word. With a little research on their part, they realize you spelled the word in Sign Language before they named it.

You don’t need to have anything on you other than your phone. You can just point to objects in the room, or cars in a parking lot, or buildings on the horizon and they’re somehow able to intuit what you’re pointing at.

They don’t always have to have their back turned. They can have their eyes closed. Or if you’re sitting at a table, you can point the camera at your hand under the table.

You can say, “I’m going to go in the other room and start humping different objects. I want you to yell through the door what you think I’m humping.” And then you go in the other room and rub your groin against whatever they call out.

The choreography with this feature is pretty simple. Let’s say you’re doing the thing where they guess the number of fingers you’re holding up. As soon as they say a number, you throw that many fingers up. I like to keep my fingers extended for about the length of the delay that’s been set (although that’s not necessary).

The only difficult thing is remembering to start talking after they give their guess. Your mind might be focused on writing something or pulling a card from an index or something, but try not to leave a bunch of dead time after their guess or it will seem off when they play it back.

Another thing to remember is that when you stop recording the video, the last few seconds of audio is going to get cut off (because the video has shifted back to the start of the audio). So you’re not going to want to immediately kill the video at the end of the trick. Let it run a few seconds. You’ll get a feel for the timing. Fortunately, the timing/choreography is really easy once you’ve learned it once. You won’t really forget it.

The way I like to use this is to suggest I’m recording some “testing” for my own purposes. It’s only afterward that I’m like… “You’re not going to believe this.” Then, after I’ve sent them the video (I prefer to watch it on their phone). I can say something like, “Okay, given that worked… there’s something else I want to try with you.” And that sort of naturally leads us into a trick that takes place in the real world, in real time, rather than on video, post factum.

I also like doing it as something to show someone right before we stop hanging out. As part of “something I’m trying out,” I ask them to help me out and guess how many fingers I’m holding out a number of times in a row (a 3-second delay is good for this). I let them get 7 or so in a row right before I stop the video. “Were you looking in a reflection or something?” They insist they weren’t. “Damn. You were in the zone.” I send them the video right then, but I don’t watch it with them. I just let them watch it later and see what they did. (Of course, there can be some Imp used that supposedly gives them this temporary ability.)

You guys are going to come up with uses for this that go beyond what I’ve suggested here. I think there’s likely going to be ways to combine this with other effects to create different types of magic beyond just me guessing right, them guessing right, or me influencing them.

I believe an update is coming soon that will add the start and stop sound of the iphone video in performance, which is a nice convincer.

Feel free to send me your ideas and/or videos and, if I get enough, I’ll make another post about this in the future.