What are some of the first things you do when you create a new effect?

Hello Luke!

It depends on what I am creating. Let me explain the process for coming up with a Tenyo type trick - Prison Box to be more specific.

Like most of my Tenyo creations, it all starts from a blank piece of paper. For Prison Box, I drew a rectangle on a piece of paper. I didn’t know where I was going with this just yet, but it was a starting point.

There wasn’t enough information on the page so I made it more interesting by drawing two vertical lines in the rectangle. I then stepped back a bit and asked myself what is it? If I looked at it from a bird’s eye view it looks like a box divided into three sections. Are these sections hollow or solid? I didn’t know. If I looked at it from a side view it looked like a platform on a base supported by 4 legs. I still needed another element to make this random sketch go somewhere.

So I added a circle to the drawing. Now was this circle a ball or was it a ring? It could even be a tube if looked from above. Perhaps a straw? I decided it was a ball. So I thought to myself this is a drawing of a box divided into three sections with a ball in one section.

What could the magic be? Well... the ball could go from one section to another. I immediately thought of the monkey bar effect of Acrobatic Silks. The monkey bar effect is where a three ropes are hanging from a bar and a ring is tied to an end rope. It jumps to the other end and then finally to the middle. Ok... so I could do the same effect with this ball.

So I just need to get the ball to move from one section to the other. Either by false walls with secret openings or by taking out the ball and inserting a duplicate ball into another section. However I then started to think that it would not be that baffling if people were to think I had two balls. So I decided it had to be a unique item and went back to the possibility it could be a ring.

A borrowed ring would be much better as they would know there would not be a duplicate in play. I then figured the ring had to be fixed in play as I didn’t want the ring rattling around inside a box as it could damage a stone. So I added the idea of rods to be inserted into each compartment and thread the ring on. This also made it more baffling as the ring would be trapped and seem even more impossible to escape. So I figured if the ring can’t come off the rod, then the rod would have to move. Etc, etc.

So that is it. From a simple geometric sketch I created Prison Box.

To sum up, I draw various sketches and think outside the box and try to imagine what the objects I drew could be. Then I go on from there.

BTW, love your sub trunk animation in your signature. It is like a mini one of my animated Mini-Morphosis gif on here!

Thank you!

Your welcome!

Wow, what an interesting creative process. Not being an artist, I always imagined the process began with an idea.
I loved learning that there are alternatives & I also love learning things that surprise me.
Thanks,
Ed