Everyone thought this was a camera trick

At almost every magic convention I attend, someone will find out I work on TV magic shows and get very upset.

They’ll say something along the lines of how maddening it is that we TV magic people always use camera tricks. We supposedly set an unrealistic expectation for the close-up workers — they say this forgetting magic in real life should always be better that TV magic if performed adequately.

I have a lot to say on this topic. Usually, I wait politely for the conversation to end, and then I never speak to the magician again. Not today, today I shall rant.

Firstly, magicians suck. They’re the worst. They’re usually just upset because they do not know how the TV trick is done. When that’s not the case, their morale arguments against camera tricks soon fall flat when given the option to perform the same trick.

Remember when a very famous magician perhaps used a split screen mask to accomplish a magic trick on television?

Magicians were not happy. For many years, this was given to me as an example as to why magicians disliked TV magicians.

Not long ago, theory11 released an affordable application which lets any magician to perform similar split screen and masking camera tricks on their zoom magic shows.

Where are all the magicians who complained about the famous magician doing the same? They’re no where to be seen — in fact, they’re on zoom shows using the camera trick method.

One of the oddest moments at Magic Live was seeing an audience of convention magicians applaud a famous lecturer who shared how they’d used camera tricks in their zoom shows.

Utterly bizarre to them have conversations hours later with magicians laying into me for working on TV series that “always use camera tricks.”

I can tell you, we’ve done a lot of debatable methods on television, but I’ve never worked on a trick with a camera trick method.

We‘ve certainly tidied up things in the edit. Occasionally a gimmick will flash if someone slows down the video or goes frame by frame. The human eye would never see it, but we’re forced to tidy it up to account for the twats who will slow down the eventual YouTube video.

I’ve never used a split screen and to be honest I probably would be opposed to doing so, but mostly because there are often easier in camera options.

The act of using a split screen or a video mask seems relatively new — but an analogue version of this has been used for a great many years in magic, long before my time on earth.

There’s one TV show I worked on, that convention magicians will always bring up. One trick in particular comes up again and again. In fact, I know of one famously “artsy” magician who mentioned the same trick to our executive producer as an example of how the show simply had no morals.

How dare we use such camera trickery.

I’m sat here writing this and I can name six magicians who told me this one trick from that one show was a camera trick. Every time I must simply stare at them wide eyed, unable to contest without revealing the secret, forced to instead stand and repeat in my head “this guy is an idiot.”

Because he is an idiot.

It was not a camera trick.

It was a mirror table.

What is it about mirrors that fool the fuck out of magicians? Laypeople everywhere will tell you that magic is all “smoke and mirrors.” But magicians seem to instantly forget this.

Perhaps it’s because most good mirror methods look exactly like an camera mask edit or a very well executed camera trick.

A mirror table, or mirror bench, is a table with a mirror placed vertically below it. By doing so, it looks like you’re looking directly through, when in fact you are seeing a reflection.

There are many things you can do to enhance a mirror table.

1. Use the correct mirror glass and clean it well.

2. Ensure lighting it the same on both sides of the table.

3. Place the table above something like grass or carpet so the line of the bottom of the mirror is camouflaged.

4. Place one of your legs either side under the table and be sure to wear matching shoes.

5. Remove the mirror at an earlier or later moment for a convincer shot.

Mirror tables really are some of the most deceptive and fooling props in magic. You can be incredibly creative with their placement and application.

Consider tiled flooring. You could even add one to a cart on wheels. You could add one under a laptop stand, below a car, or within the gaps of a wooden fence.

You can use these mirrors to hide objects, people and vehicles. You can use them to make these things vanish or disappear.

If you wish to be even more deceptive, you can use these for a different trick entirely. Use them to sneakily switch a prediction, or to retrieve a vanished object for a long-distance transposition.

That’s the rant.

See this article as nothing but encouragement to use mirrors in your magic, and a collective “sod off” to all those pesky convention magicians.