A couple of weeks ago, a friend shared an incredible Instagram video of a successful magician making a Rubik’s cube appear from an iPad screen.

The Rubiks cube trick was a camera trick; you could see the classic telltale signs of rotoscoping. I told this to my friend, and I think he felt let down.

“Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does.”

But camera tricks aren’t allowed; that’s cheating? That’s why we feel let down when magicians use camera tricks? Right?

Magicians promise to deceive you, but they also promise never to use camera tricks. And that’s a problem.

Magicians spent decades reassuring the audience that they never ever ever use camera tricks. This is odd because magicians are so happy to tell everyone they’re using every other method under the sun. Think back to Derren telling the world he used a mixture of magic, hypnosis, suggestion, sleight of hand and definitely no camera tricks ever.

There’s less chance of you hearing a magician be honest about the number of camera tricks they’ve used than winning the lottery.

When a magician uses a camera trick, it feels dishonest, and magicians are to blame.

It doesn’t need to be that way.

The lines between camera tricks and magic tricks are being blurred to the point where it’s almost too late for us to be having this debate.

I realised over the weekend that a popular series “VFX artists react to Bad and Good CGI” has so many similarities to Fool Us… but also it feels just like a bunch of magic friends watching magic videos together. Trying to figure out how it’s done and cheering at brilliant uses of popular techniques.

What Even Is a Camera Trick?

Look, let’s break this down. I’m going to list many tools editor can use, and you can decide which ones are fair game for magicians. I’m also going to bare all and be honest when I’ve come across or used one of these on a television show.

Crushing The Blacks (Guilty)

On stage, black art was a powerful tool in which bright lights changed the natural exposure levels inside our eyeballs and blended all the blacks. This can now be achieved artificially, even on your phone. You tap the screen on an iPhone and pull down the exposure levels, or add a filter as you upload your TikTok video of you making something vanish in front of your black T-Shirt.

I’ve used this, but not in the way that so many people cheat it on social media at the moment. A couple of years back, before black art was overused, I used it for an advertising campaign in the UK. When we hit the edit, we realised anyone could boost the exposure and reveal the method. This is somewhat like the recent TikTok scandal in which people were able to reveal the naked bodies of people participating in the silhouette challenge. Anyways, we crushed the blacks as a preventative measure so no one could proactively reveal the method later. The trick worked flawlessly on camera and in person. I find it odd when magicians who crush the blacks in their social media posts get upset at TV magicians doing tricks they could never do live.

Green Screen

In many cases, what is the difference between green screen and black art? Black art was initially a powerful tool of stage magicians, and by using stage lighting, the eyes of the audience would crush the blacks themselves. Green screen or blue screen is and always has been the visual effects’ version, in which everything on screen that is a certain colour can be removed with a click of a button.

Out Of Frame (Guilty)

In real life, a magician might look up at someone to subconsciously prompt them to look back up at you too. When they do this, their hands might drop below the spectator’s vision line to make a sneaky move. You can achieve the same thing with a camera. I think where this one becomes challenging for some people is the extent you decide to take it. In real life, you can get away with a deck switch or setting up a double lift. But it’s unlikely you’ll be able to switch something as large as some of these TikTokers do.

I’m not entirely sure where I land on this one. I’ve definitely followed the rule of using the camera to replicate what a spectator’s eyes would do if they were there. But I also think it’s harder to get away with this on camera than in real life and usually look for an alternative. I’ve switched HUGE items in real life with the help of accomplices who sneak into the room and up to us to aid the switch.

Cutting Around a Sleight (Guilty)

If there’s something you don’t want the audience at home to see, you can always cut to a reaction or an establishing shot instead. The truth is, this often happens naturally in the edit without the magician’s involvement.

I’ve been in edits where I’ve had to actively argue and persuade the series producer and editor to edit back into the show the “special move” after they cut around it. I did that because it felt dodgier to cut around it than show it. They’d cut it to help the pacing, and it had nothing to do with hiding the method for them.

Audio Edits (Guilty)

Got a prop that makes a lot of noise? Got a prop that doesn’t make any noise but should? You can always add or remove audio into the edit. But it can get more creative than that. If your magician asks, “Think of any random number, between 1 and 50?” you can edit that to become “Think of any random number.”

I worked on a show with magicians who had a coding act. In what felt like a goodwill gesture at the time, I removed a line of audio in the edit that I thought would make the trick easier for them to continue performing. In my mind, I felt it was similar to how performers who usually “force” one outcome in their theatre show might force something else the day it aired on television. That’s one reason a show like Derren’s feels so different live to on the telly. In hindsight, I sometimes believe I was wrong to remove the audio from the coding act. But you sort of need to understand the full context of the edit. The way they’d edited the act put so much emphasis on the line of dialogue. The shot they’d chosen and the way they’d dropped out the music to build suspense. It all made the line of dialogue stand out to me. Who knows if I got that one, right? It was a quick decision when I was darting between three edits rooms to give magic passes of cuts.

Drop-in Pick Up (Guilty)

You magician performs a trick for the spectator, and it all goes brilliantly. But “The Magic Eyes” have a difficult decision to make. They know that the trick flashed for the camera, standing slightly to the spectator's left. What do we do now? Do we throw out the performance and the brilliant reaction? Or do we pick-up (reshoot) the magic shot and drop-it into the edit as if it was all one take?

I’m usually on the side of the production, not the magician. Multiple shows I’ve worked on have magicians who come on with their own tricks, and their own tricks are not good for TV. I try my best to steer people in the right direction, but it can be not easy when the magician says it’ll work great and the producer doesn’t know better. And then you’re sat wide-eyed as they perform a trick that should only be performed to one person to two people, the spectator and the camera. Am I guilty of dropping a better performance into an edit—absolutely. The spectator saw the same trick the audience at home sees, and I haven’t ever lost too much sleep over this.

Rotoscoping/Masking (Guilty)

Rotoscoping is a way of cutting something out of the frame. Let’s say you want to drop a bag of weed onto the floor, but you don’t want to see it fall to the ground; try rotoscoping. The part you cut out is replaced with a clean version of the same frame. This is why most magicians who do this need to use a tripod for the part with the camera trick. Big Hollywood films get to use programmable moving cameras that repeat a shot perfectly.

The general acceptance of the brilliant MagicMask has really changed my understanding of what magicians consider acceptable camera tricks. Does the fact that a camera trick gets performed live change things? Is the mixture of skill and camera trick more accepted?

I’m guilty of this on two occasions. Once again, preventative measures. We realised that if you paused the trick and went frame by frame, the method was exposed in a couple of frames. I mean literally three frames and only a few pixels within those frames. And so, we rotoscoped. The trick worked in real life and on camera in real-time.

Forced Perspective

Super simple, by performing to the camera, you have full control of the exact angle of view. Weirdly, forced perspective is often revealed by magicians as a fun, playful tool. Think about Penn and Teller’s “Are We Live?” SNL opening when they hung upside down for the entirety of the performance. Or Richard Wiseman and Luis Piedrahita’s amazing uses of forced perspective for a whole host of optical illusions.

I’ve used forced perspective for real-life magic and also on camera. I stood shielded by Wiseman’s body to hand him a football. We also revealed the method as part of the bit on the TV show. So I guess that’s most definitely allowed.

Hey, isn't it weird that there’s always been an unwritten rule that camera tricks are ok so long as you say you’re using camera tricks…