Title: Digital Twin
Artist: SansMinds Creative Lab
Producers: Sands Minds Magic
Link: Available At Your Favorite Murphy’s Magic Dealer
Retail Price: $29.95 USD
Learning Difficulty: Easy
Length of DVD: 40 Minutes

Digital Twin allows you to use either your phone or a spectator’s to digitally clone a bank note (paper currency) right before everyone’s eyes. The serial numbers on the bills will match!

As far as cell phone magic goes Digital Twin is a pretty neat concept. The cell phone isn’t used as a means of accomplishing the trick, but it does aid in the performance. That is to say that this isn’t an app you download or anything where the cell phone is doing the magic for you. You will though need to pick up on some basic sleight of hand moves, and have some patience when it comes to gimmick construction.

The gimmick construction…all I can say is “wow.” They cover a few ways you can make the gimmicks and they range from something simple to very complex using photo shop, and scanning in this, editing that, printing this, yadda yadda yadda. Way to much effort for a simple bill effect. The simple approach they explained worked for me, and thank god. I suck at photo editing software!

The trick itself is pretty *** neat. You borrow a bill from someone, or you can use your own too, and you take a quick video of it. You make note of the serial number on the bill. You put the phone in your hand, replay the video moving the phone away at a dramatic moment and wallah! You’re holding an exact copy of the spectator’s bill serial number and all. I’ve performed this a couple times and I’ve gotten a fairly mixed bag of slow burners who took a minute to finally work out for themselves the impossibility of what just happened, upwards to a few very vocal reactions from a coworker who claimed I was Satan and crossed herself before refusing to talk to me the rest of the day. So I can say that I’m pretty pleased with how well this effect is hitting.

This is probably one of the more practical street magic effects with a cell phone that is out there. Your angles are pretty solid, and it doesn’t take a long time to learn how to perform it. You’ll probably spend more time making the *** bills than you will learning how to do the trick. The reset is quick but it’s not instantaneous or anything. You won’t want to do this for the same audience twice in a row anyways so you’ll find it quick enough to reset while you’re walking away. This trick is ideal for table hopping. The cell phone element makes it good for streets because it gives it that urban feel.

The downside to this trick is that it is way to over explained! So many times during the video I wanted to scream “Just F&!king shut up and get on with it already!” I’m serious. Not every single move needs to be broken down, re-explained, re-shown, and then explained again like we’re complete idiots. The upside to this is that for the people who have never bought a magic trick before in their life will probably appreciate all the time and attention they spend on every single nuance in this trick. However everyone else is going to be pulling their hair out trying to sludge through this unnecessarily long tutorial. I swear you could probably have cut 10 to 15 minutes off the run time if you would have edited down or reshot the tutorial to remove all the over explanation that is going on. At one point I just hit the mute button and followed along with the motions. So if that’s my only complaints about this product then I guess I’m doing well for myself.

Overall this is a fun little bit of magic to perform. I really liked Digital Twin and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes doing money magic, or likes having an urban organic feel to their style. The TV rights for this routine are withheld by SansMinds so you can’t go doing this for film, but I think it’ll find a good home in most people’s walk around sets.

When I give my product scores below I am measuring them on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 Being absolute the worst score possible, and 10 being the absolute best, making a score of five average. The four points that I grade upon is Product Quality, Teaching Quality, Sound & Video Quality and Overall Quality.

Product Quality: 8
Good price, fun trick.

Teaching Quality: 3
I’m intentionally failing you on this category for unnecessary over explaining. Just like you can talk yourself out of a good sale, you can also talk yourself right out of a good score.

Video & Sound Quality: 8
Good video, good sound.

Overall Quality: 8
Ignoring the poor teaching quality score I have to say that this is a solid effect. I recommend it, and I think that you’ll really enjoy it.


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