I talk about some great examples of illusionists who have taken another path in magic and found success outside Las Vegas and conventional magic venues.

The Spencers

Jay Owenhouse

In my book illusiontech I go into detail on some of these methods for magicians.  For general audiences I thought an overview of these concepts would be worthwhile without spoiling their enjoyment of magic.

• Trim to break the device into smaller sections.  
• Minimal use of buttons to mask the scale of the device.  
• Rounded corners to make the device seem smaller in a similar way to the bevel.
• Black borders to make the screen seem larger.

Andrew Mayne is an illusionist and author.  He’s worked creatively for Penn & Teller, David Blaine and produced over 40 books and DVDs on the art of magic.  His website is at AndrewMayne.com

Getting started

• How to put a routine together
• How to work with your assistants
• How to stage an illusion in the place you’re going to perform it
• How to look at it objectively and improve it

The 5 Secrets to Magic Success on America’s Got Talent

This season of America’s Got Talent was a banner year for magic. I was proud to see a number of my friends bring it to audiences. I think every one of them is champion.

It was great to see Michael Grasso go farther than any other magician has before. All I know about Michael was what I saw on TV (actually YouTube and Hulu…). I get why the judges were impressed. There’s a lot to be learned by his success and that of the other magicians on America’s Got Talent.

I thought it’d be fun to break it down into five helpful secrets. I get a lot of email from aspiring magicians who want to break in via America’s Got Talent. While that’s not shall we say a “realistic” expectation, I’m happy to proffer my thoughts to anyone who cares to listen.

I’m going to use Grasso as an example, but I think there’s stuff to learn from everybody. I think Sperry, Restivo and Murray got as far as they did because they’re sharp people. We’d all do well to study their success. More people saw them perform in the last few weeks than just about any other magician in history. That earns my respect.

Routining
The first thing that struck me about Michael Grasso was that he gets routining. Every one of his effects has a kicker too it. The biggest mistake you can do in magic, especially on television, is to be too linear. You can’t just escape from the box or saw the lady in half. There has to be a surprise twist. A twist isn’t just surprise revelation where you escape and appear somewhere else. It’s got to be a bonus piece of magic. It needs to be something that nobody saw coming. A substitution trunk or a regular levitation are fine pieces of magic, but there’s no surprise to them beyond the effect. Grasso’s magic had twists that happened after you thought the trick was over.

Expert TV help
No matter how clever you are, you want to get the smartest people you can find to help you out. Here’s the biggest problem: There are a lot of well-known magicians who know absolutely nothing about television. They’re dangerous because they have no idea how little they understand about television magic, but they’ll give you advice anyway. I’ve seen them give performers advice that might work well at a magic convention, but will kill them on TV.

Grasso got some good advice from guys like Enrico de la Vega. Enrico is a young guy, but don’t be fooled. Having worked with Cyril and other projects he’s worked on more quality magic specials than just about anyone I can name. Enrico gets magic on television. I’d trust his advice more than just about anyone on the planet. He’s behind some of the most amazing television magic in the last decade. Grasso picked right and he listened.

Play it safe
If you just looked at the material Michael Grasso performed you wouldn’t see anything that really stood out. Most of it was over twenty years old and based on stock magic methods that had been exposed on television (to no consequence). Of course saying that is like saying the Buck Twins are just doing card tricks. Grasso is a strong performer who took solid material and “plussed” it. This is playing it safe. It’s the smart thing to do.

A lot of magicians are tempted to reinvent the wheel when they’re in front of the largest audience of their career. This is because they feel the need to do something bigger and better. The problem is that they often have the wrong idea of what “bigger and better” is supposed to be. They get stuck thinking like a magician trying to impress other magicians. They look for methods and effect they think will impress their peers. That’s stupid. Go for tested material that audiences like and then make it as awesome as it can be. If you go watch early David Copperfield specials you’ll see he took a similar approach that Grasso did: Take old effects and bring them up to date. Making any illusion look good hard. It’s pointless to experiment with untested material on live television.

Mike Super won Phenomenon because he was smart enough to ignore the producers of the show who wanted to push him into doing something he knew was outside of what was strengths were. This happens a lot in television. If it seems too risky, it probably is.

Have a story
Grasso got as far as he did because of his talent. His medical problems made him even more interesting as a person. When it comes to competition reality shows, you need to have a story. It doesn’t have to be as life and death as Grasso’s story, but it should be compelling and give you dimension as a human being. It can’t just be that you’ve wanted to be famous all your life. Everybody on that show has wanted to be famous all their life.

Dig down into that place you hide from people and pull something out. Are you cleaning toilets at night so you can pay for magic rehearsal space. Are you living in your parent’s basement? Did you give up magic because your partner ran off with your act? Find something that makes you vulnerable and human.

Do the work
Grasso and everyone else we saw this season worked to get where they are. These guys eat, drink and sleep magic. They’re busting their balls trying to make things happen. I get a lot of email from people with plans and ideas. It’s all bull. People like that just want to talk about magic. They want someone to wave a wand and make it happen. I get asked for advice. I tell them to get out and perform. They tell me there’s nowhere near them to perform. I give up. This isn’t North Korea. Go somewhere. Somebody who wants to make it work will drive six hours to get on a stage to try out a routine for nothing just so they can have the experience.

If you don’t have that trait, give up now. Grasso, Sperry, Restivo and Murray are all very different personalities but they all have that streak in them. To get anywhere you got to do the work. Are you really willing to do what it takes?

From my HiddenFrequency.com blog:

So Leo Laporte woke up yesterday and realized that his Google Buzz account was broken and nobody noticed. That’s the end of social media for Leo. Paul Carr over at TechCrunch noticed this and opined that all of his twittering has come at the expense of his soulful blogging. Paul too has decided social media has run its course.

With all due respect. I think I perceive social media a little differently from them. It’s about your community, and I don’t mean the community as in “fan club”. I mean community as in the people you have one-on-one interactions with. People whom you have a mutual interest in. The operative phrase being “mutual”.

Leo is an absolute pioneer in online broadcasting and a hero to me. But it’s important to see that Twitter isn’t another form of online broadcasting.

Hint: If you have to use TweetDeck or some tool that lets you follow 1,000’s of people on Twitter then you’re having a different experience than those of us who follow a hundred or fewer people. I read every tweet from every person I follow. That’s why I only follow a few people. I don’t need Twitter to be truncated RSS.

If you treat Twitter as another broadcast outlet, that’s exactly what it becomes. It’s just talk radio with words. Twitter for me at least is like a huge conference call with all my friends.

A tweet from a celebrity with 200,000 followers doesn’t get top billing over a tweet from a friend with 2 followers. And that’s the way Twitter is supposed to work. That’s a very hard concept to understand for people used to a feudal web where one person is the gatekeeper of an audience.

And there’s the difference. Twitter isn’t your audience. It’s your community. It’s easy to tell the difference: The guy on stage at the concert is in front of his audience. The people in the stands are in their community. When the concert is over the audience vanishes but the community continues; with or without the man on stage.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher ofWeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

The following is a post from my HiddenFrequency.com blog

Facebook often acts like a bad friend. We’re never quite sure we stand with them. One day they’re making life awesome, the next day they’re telling our secrets to people we don’t want to know. Telling us to pay attention to our privacy settings is like a friend that tells everyone who you made out with last night because you didn’t expressly tell them not to tell anyone. They win on a technicality.

But that’s not why we forgive Facebook or why we think of it as a friend. Or why Mark Zuckerberg can probably get as much action as that vampire dude from Twilight.

We forgive Facebook because of our biology. Specifically because of a hormone called oxytocin. You can read my buddy Dr. Paul Zak’s site for more information about that. In Marvel comics terms, it’s a chemical our brain releases that makes us trust and like each other. Getting a back massage will release it. Having sex will release it. Thinking about people you love can trigger it. Looking at photos of your friends can trigger it. And there you have it: Every time you go to Facebook your body is flooded with this love hormone. By proxy, we love Facebook.

Don’t blame Facebook, blame your biology. If we weren’t addicted to this hormone we’d be able to face up to Facebook like a clearheaded reptile and tell it to stop, or eat it’s young, or whatever animals that don’t have oxytocin receptors do when they’re upset. Instead, we do what every other primate does, screech a bit, bare our teeth and then hug and make-up.

Search is dead. People click less. Growth is only supported by adding users and getting us to spend more time online. We reach peak users this decade and probably peak time next week. After that growth stops. ‘Nuff said.

Then what happens? Text ads die too. Finally we give up the current metaphor and find a new one that better fits how we use the web.

The future has always been social
The one thing everyone knows about the next metaphor is that it somehow involves the word “social” like the last one used “context”. The most obvious example of a social platform right now is Facebook. Yet, the most effective social (and contextual) ad platform in history has a CPM of .04%. That’s 400 clicks out of a million impressions. Scary stuff. Thankfully for them they’ve got entire internal economies based on games and virtual currencies. Facebook will do just fine. So what about the rest of us?

It’s obvious that the newspaper/magazine metaphor we arrived at in the 1990’s for monetizing the internet isn’t going to last any longer than actual newspapers and magazines. Those of us not named Facebook need a new metaphor.

A starting point for a metaphor can be a meme. The current meme is all about social proof. Startups like Blippy and Facebook concepts like Beacon are based upon the idea of using social proof as a way to get you to buy the things your friends are buying.

Both were very clumsy attempts (perceived as being either invasive and/or outright tacky) at cracking the social marketing problem. As obnoxious as it is to build a startup that tweets the conspicuous consumption of affluent Bay area folks to a world going through the worst recession in a generation, it was an attempt by very smart people to solve a problem we have no clear solution for: How do you make people buy things when they don’t want to click on ads anymore? Solution (or so they think): tell your friends what you’re buying and maybe they’ll follow suit.

Near as I can tell, Blippy, Beacon and similar platforms are a metaphoric crossbreed of a Tupperware party and the price tag on Minnie Pearl’s hat. It’s using people’s own consumption as advertising to their friends.

I think there’s potential in that metaphor if it doesn’t come across as being too invasive or tacky. Unfortunately, those are the two things the people trying hardest in that space excel at being.

A really good metaphor, one that we can use to contextualize all of this networked activity, should give us at least another decade of growth and innovation. This metaphor that gives us a new, yet familiar way to look at things and plug in content, business and social interaction is the what’s going to unleash the next big boom in online commerce. Like search and contextual advertising did for the last decade, this new metaphor is will be the launching point for the next trillion-dollar online economy. So what is it?

We’ve already met part of the metaphor…
The important parts of this metaphor are right in front of us. We just haven’t recognized it yet. Text ads, search and contextual advertising were around before Google figured out how to make them all work and we saw the Internet as a giant newspaper/magazine metaphor.

We know the next stage has got to be social and that’s why there’s all of that investing into apparently ridiculous schemes. This isn’t a game where it pays to sit on the sidelines when you’ve got billions of cash at your disposal to spend on experiments. Blippy, Beacon, even the nefarious Pay-Per-Post provided us with lots of information about people’s behavior. Granted, you could have probably learned a lot of this with some clever small scale experiments, but that’s not the way VCs work. It’s all anecdotal until you try it. These are folks willing to build their own space fleets on a whim. Spending ten million to annoy you with locations services or show you how crass your friends are is chump change for them. People say they’re aiming for the next Google. But actually they’re actually aiming to be even bigger than that.

Taking a wisdom of the crowds perspective, we can deduce:
1. Somehow it’s “social”.
2. It won’t be something that makes us click outside our area of interest.
3. We’re going to be even more annoyed by the failed attempts.
4. It’s going to make us rethink “privacy” (an already an alien concept to anyone under 20).
5. It’ll be explained to us as a metaphor we already understand in a different context.
6. Really smart people are spending lots of money on things they think are part of it. There’s a reason Google has been smothering pet projects in the crib; they want to focus their resources.

Those are just a few pieces of the puzzle. I personally suspect that the next metaphor isn’t necessarily going to be something as simple as saying the Internet is now like pay cable or radio. In fact, I think we’ve already exhausted all the traditional forms of looking at media as a metaphor for the internet. Sure it’d be nice to invent some new construct to look at it, but that never works with humans. We work with patterns we’re already familiar with.

I thing this next metaphor is going to based much more on how humans do trade and not how we consume information. And I just don’t necessarily mean how we did commerce in the 20th century, the Middle Ages or even during the time of the Phoenicians. I think we may need to start talking to anthropologists about much deeper metaphors that go back 100,000 years or maybe even further. But not too much further. It’s not a metaphor that applies to chimps or even our more closer related ancestors like Homo Erectus or Neanderthal. I bet elements of it are in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Figure out which part and maybe you’ll be the one to figure out the trillion-dollar metaphor everyone is looking to find.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher of WeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

Weird Things Live: Hunting the Night Creeper from Andrew Mayne on Vimeo.

Last Monday night in front of a live internet audience we set out to solve the mystery of the Night Creeper. Ghost? Frogman? Or something else? Although we’re pretty sure we figured it out, we haven’t definitively proved our theory. The mystery continues… Running time 55 minutes.

Check out our photos of the scene on Flickr.

We’re trying something new in conjunction with WeirdThings.com.  WeirdThings.TV, all the weird you can handle 3 times a week.

Andrew Mayne presents an evil twist on a classic shock magic effect:

Phase 1:  Demonstrate your ability to control pain by piercing a fish hook through your skin.

Phase 2:  Display your uncanny ability to control your blood flow by moving the hook around without a single drop of blood.

Phase 3:  Rip the fish hook from you flesh and appear to heal instantaneously in a supernatural manner. 

…All of this takes place while the spectator holds on to one end of the hook.

Hook is Andrew Mayne’s devious update to the classic needle through arm effect.  Shove an unprepared fish hook through your arm while a spectator holds on to one end of it at all time.  For a disturbing finale, you rip the fish hook straight out of your arm completely unharmed.

Includes step-by-step instructions and special handling instructions.

DVD running time 30 minutes

Price only $14.95 (free shipping)

Available in the iTunes App Store for just $.99

Use the Ghost Vision Viewer to find out if there’s paranormal or supernatural activity going on:

Radar: Maps out points in space and tells you if a highly improbable and potentially paranormal event is taking place.

Imager:  Creates an image from random “noise”.  

Word generator:  Find out what messages are being sent to you via this randomizer.

PK Detector:  Is there a physical entity near you?  Use the PK detector to find out.  It used the accelerometer and touch screen to map out any unusual forces.

Arrow:  Use the arrow as a paranormal compass to point towards high weirdness.

Yes/No:  Think there’s something that wants to make contact?  Use the Yes/No function to ask questions.

The Ghost Vision Viewer is based upon the same kind of random systems parapsychology labs use to detect paranormal events.  Unlike EMF and EVP detectors, it’s not as prone towards false positives and user interference.

Currently there’s no credible scientific evidence for the paranormal.  But maybe you can be the first to find it!

April 26th – May 2nd 2010

HOLLYWOOD, CA – Magician, illusionist and paranormalist Andrew Mayne will be bringing his Magic, Mischief & Mayhem to the Magic Castle close-up parlor as part of Rudy Coby’s Magic vs. Science take-over of the Castle.

One of magic’s most sought after thinkers, Mayne is know for his unique approach to combining magic, pop-culture and technology; inspired equally by Harry Houdini and Marvel Comics. 

For the first time ever he’ll be bringing his stage show into the intimate close-up theatre so people can witness up close some of his signature effects as well as some new surprises just for Castle audiences.

Seating is limited to just 22 people per show

For admission availability, contact: broman@magiccastle.com

So Rudy Coby, calls me up and asks me if I want to perform at the Castle during his week there. “Sure”, I respond without really thinking it through. After I hang up I realize I haven’t done a straight up magic show in the last million years that didn’t involve explaining how oxytocin receptors can be manipulated to encourage confabulation or how long dead Scottish philosphers deeply understood modern neuroeconomic principles. No problem…

Ever since I stopped touring most of my performing has been at conferences on economics and science. It’s a very fun venue and has allowed me to meet some very cool people. I’ve learned a lot from those folks and my show has evolved considerably from the experience. The problem is that my show evolved into a lecture. Great for those conferences, not so much for general audiences. While I think lay people would be interested in the same stuff I am, just not in that venue.

So now I find myself starting over from square one. Only this time I plan on using some of what I’ve learned in the structure of the show. I’ve actually called on one of my super genius science friends to help me with a stunt that I’ll be doing unless it actually kills me first.

In ten days I’ll get to perform this new hybrid of a show that evolved from the lecture that evolved from my original show. I’ve got some cool stuff planned and I hope it all works out right. We’ve already tested some of the stuff (Like Puppet Prestige) and called in a favor or two for a special guest appearance…

If you’re in town and want to check it out, rumor has it that there may be day passes available here: broman@magiccastle.com

I’ll also be posting on Twitter when I have guest slots available.

Hope to see you there…

Print edition 

Andrew Mayne presents his most practical levitations for the stage and the street.  Combining updated material from Touching Sky and step-by-step instructions from Levitator (DVD).

Learn how to levitate on the street, in your living room or on stage.

32 pages full-sized 8.5″ by 11″

Only $14.95 includes free shipping!