Quote:
Originally Posted by bluedragon  I understand, but by saying that, you dismiss the fact that the magician may have any genuine skills pertaining to his craft (camera tricks are not a magician's skill, but a charlatan's). When I say mentalist skills, I refer to tricks pertaining to the mind: NLP, hypnosis, reading body language and eye movements, the subtle tones in someone's voice. Not some lousy video editing done by a computer guy. Or using a stoodge or an actor. That would dismiss the very idea that the magician is the one performing the trick, not the guys handling the camera or the actors. And it says at the beginning of every show that no stoodges or actors were used, and no video editing. |
Sorry, I explained what I meant to say wrong. I'm not saying Darren has no "skills" as a magician/mentalist. He's very talented. What I was trying to say is that on TV you don't see everything he does in person.
He doesn't have to use stooges or camera tricks. All he has to really do is just not show certain things. For example, let's say I hired a camera crew to follow me around a mall. I walked up to 200 people and I asked them:
"Think of a two digit number, that's odd and the first and second digits are not the same number."
Then, I look at the person and say "Was it thirty seven?". Now, two things can happen.
(1) The person says "YES! Holy crap, how did you do that!??!?!!" and I have that on camera... or
(2) The person says "Nope." in which case I say to him "Ok, I want you to take that number in your mind right down and add the number 37 to it..." and I proceed to transition into another trick totally unrelated to it.
Anyway, so at the end of the day lets say I have 8 hours of video recorded. Now I just go back and cut down the video footage into a 30 minute segment, highlighting only the times when I was 100% correct in guessing the number or any other tricks I did where the reaction I got was so amazing.
Then if I showed someone the footage, they would be pretty impressed only seeing all the "miracles" I've created and none of the blunders.
That's what I meant by "video tricks"...not really that he edits the video with special effects to make it look like magic.
Also, one thing I've learned by studying magic is that is almost every single case, the explanation you're being led to believe is the method how he does something is actually the opposite of how he actually does something.
Meaning, if he's asking the guy to put his hand on the table and imagine an ATM and imagine typing in his pin number, you're being led to believe that the guys hands are giving away the secret, or his eyes or something like that. This is classical misdirection. In reality I would be willing to bet he's using a totally different method of getting the PIN number that doesn't require the guys hand to be on the table or any of that.
I'm not sure if you've ever been to a Copperfield show, but he does something even more amazing.
Here's a quick description:
(1) There is a box, hanging from a chain about 30 feet above the stage.
(2) Copperfield throws a beachball around the audience and it randomly selects people based on who it lands on. The audience selection process is totally random as for one of the tricks he did my wife got picked.
(3) Each person tells him a letter or a number.
(4) Once I think 6 letters/numbers are picked, they lower the box that's been hanging there the whole time.
(5) The box is opened and inside is a bag. He pulls out the bag and inside the bag is a license plate.
(6) He pulls out the license plate and it's stamped with the letters/numbers that were just picked.
People freak out.