Part of the problem is how magicians in general learn, and the fact that when you go into a magic shop most are selling dreams. They are told absurd things such as if you want to learn the timing or whatever, you have to start by doing the trick word for word, move for move and then branch out and make it your own. Hardly anyone ever does. Singers do not start this way and neither does any art form I can think of. Learn to be yourself, learn why timing works, learn why movement matters and don't just hang your hat on "the big move covers the small move". Learn exactly why things are funny or dramatic. Learn the principals needed to engage an audience. Learn why movement is purposeful and how it can help in telling a story on stage, or even close up.

Mind you this is all in an effort to get an act ready to go. It is not for someone who wants to perform for their friends and family or whoever.

I think preparing a routine for friends and family should receive the same treatment and attention one would give to getting ready to perform in a professional setting.

Get it as polished as possible, and be sure it’s entertaining. Otherwise, accolades you receive may be simply because you’re family or a friend. And that’s not being a magician.

That’s the way I feel about it. Others may disagree.

I don't disagree in the slightest and believe it would be FAR better for the art of magic if people thought the same.

I just know that every time I say that people should do this, in this particular way I am often told that there is a difference in professional performance and just friends and family. And for purposes of this particular discussion we certainly are talking about professional presentation. So in reality I guess the point is mute. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it. I guess I am used to these discussions getting derailed and was trying to get in front of it LOL. Sorry!

I certainly don't want to derail this thread, but would taking a good honest look at your props, and deciding whether they need updating, fit into "getting an act ready to go?" I'm thinking of all those boxes and stuff we still see with the dragons and nondescript decorations on them. Or would that be a separate thread?

That HAS to be part of it!

Here is an example. There was a magician here in Branson a decade ago (Probably more.) who shall be nameless. He had props from a big name act who were mentoring him. When it came time to do his sawing, suddenly he comes out in jeans from the 1970's! (To match the jeans on the dummy in the prop.) Also as it turns out when he gets in the contraption, after this guy who came out to put the gimmick on dressed like Egor for some unknown reason, he GREW about 6 inches!! My mother, who at the time was about 73 just looked at me and laughed. Couldn't be bothered to change anything and assumed nobody would notice. Mind you he was "big time" by the time this happened.

How many still come on stage looking like pirates to hide things? My lord how many still use Mexican Centavo's allegedly saying they are Mexican currency and they haven't been since the 1970's? FINALLY folks have gotten past saying "Red Hot Mamma" when they do that dumb card trick! And of course the ubiquitous Chinese Dragons. UGH.

One of my favorite bird acts ever is in Speakeasy Magick. He wears a straight up suit from 2025! Current, looks great, fits great, and fools the heck out of you from literally 4 feet away 8 times a week. As far as I am concerned he is already one of the all time greats, and is still under 30. It was a pleasure to get to watch him every night.

Yes updating props is mandatory. I have never been a Criss Angel fan, but he sure did updates to a lot of things. He did a metamorphoses with no curtain. I was't a fan of his solution, but he did it. He does that with lots of props.

Lance Burton doing Bump with a Teepee theme. Fantastic.

I think it is all part of getting it ready and setting yourself apart.

I agree, that is definitely part of it. George brings up a great point to all of this getting an act ready to go which is it is much more than just your performance materials. Yes, tricks and effects are part of it, but there is also so much more to having create or put together an act or show. There is your image, look, and perception, that of your material, props, storylines, transitions, equipment, promotional materials, signage/logos, just to name a few. How do you sound? There is no point if you can not be properly heard and understood. What about production? So much more than just the tricks you decide to perform.

The props have to reflect who you are. I thought it was great the way The Amazing Jonathan was able to use junky props and make fun of them and they became part of who he was in the act. You knew right away so when the Linking Rings came out he used them as him. It was brilliant.

Sometimes it is just using the props like you. Here are Penn and Teller doing exactly that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKSOCnLVzG4

I doubt I would ever be creative enough to produce this routine.

Anyhow yes props matter and the right use of them is important.

Man, did I open a can of worms!

Granted I'm a set designer and therefore [blah blah blah] but this has bugged me since long before I became one. Some of the decor on box props, silks, and so forth, including illusions, looks like nothing else in the galaxy: blocks and stripes and flashes of color that have nothing to do with each other. Or designs that were okay in decades past but are now kitschy. And we still see it. Yet nowadays it's so easy to get inspiration in-person or online instead of just making it up, it's crazy.

Wanna make something "Victorian?" Lots of resources for all sixty-four years of the period.. Egyptian? Lots of resources for all two-thousand-odd years. Chinese? Japanese? Indian? Pick a country or civilization: lots of resources. Steampunk? Art Nouveau? Art Deco? Sci-fi? Anything else? Lots of resources. And the vast majority of this material was created by professional craftspeople, artisans, artists, designers, who knew what they were doing.

I've been telling young designers for years: people will see what you put out there, not what you think you put out there. And it'll have your name on it.

The main issue there is justification. If the plot was based on some topic from the 70s, with disco or whatever as an accompanying track he could have still salvaged it as a period piece thing.

It's when things are inconsistent that it's weird. It's like what you said, "Egor for some reason" things were just happening.

It has nothing to do with justification. If you have to justify props you have already made a mistake. That is the point.

Okay, so what could this guy have done to get his sawing bit ready for an audience? I don't know anything about him or the rest of his show, so I'll limit it to the sawing.

I had a coaching student for a few years that was very visionary and creative in his business, his live show, and his branding. He wanted to be unique and different from the pack which I also strongly encouraged.

So he wanted some of his props redesigned to meet the ideas and vision that he had in his mind. To meet his level of creativity. He went to a very known and established prop-maker, told him EXACTLY what he wanted (so no creativity was involved from the prop-maker, just producing it) to make it easy for him, and he got no response. This went on for weeks. Finally he was able to reach him only to discover the guy was wishy-washy about this. So he then tried another well-known prop-maker/designer, and he got the same not interested, wishy-washy, runaround, non-committal, non-response and had again to be tracked down only for him to also be hesitant or extremely less than excited about the project.

All these guys just wanted to do was stick to the red box with gold dragon designs, and other out-of-date, unoriginal designs. It was absolutely crazy. The performer was on to something big and it would have led to a great deal of work from him for both live, video/TV productions, animation, projects and much more.

These were well thought out ideas and although the props themselves would have been the longtime traditional functioning props, only the exterior designs (color, logo, fonts, style, etc.) would be different and creatively updated. He even gave them sketches, photos, and laid everything out for them to make it extremely easy for them

Nope! Not interested at all. And these were big name, recognized guys in their area of specialty. It was during this very frustrating period (this was over maybe 4-6 months of trying to reach them, meet with them, send them the sketches, materials and everything, that I realized most of these guys also seemed to be monkey-see, monkey-do, the same as most magicians. I would have thought they would have jumped at the chance to work with my client and the pride of having their work being seen on TV, DVDs, and of course front and center on stage at live performances. Nope, not at all.

We thought maybe they didn't see the vision or understand it was just aesthetics that we were talking about, not complete technical redesigns of classic props...Nope, they fully understood and simply were not interested in this at all.

Worse yet, none of them said n I'm not interested, they just stopped returning calls and emails and ignoring him altogether. Again, it was crazy to me.

Here you have a young performer who is bursting with creativity, has a vision for exactly what he wants, is very clear and concise in explaining his needs and interests, was willing to pay decent deposits for the work, was willing to invest in himself, his props, and his show and production (which most young magicians and performers are not), and was ambitious to allow the prop-makers to even showcase and promote their work on these to the prop-maker's audience and his business, and there was no interest at all. They weren't even helpful to direct him where else he might go or to refer someone else. You would have thought he wanted something impossible to do, or perhaps even illegal by the way they viewed this request.

This was my first experience of anything like this and it still amazes me to this day.

The answer to this is the classic difference between simple and easy.

What could he have done? He could have used the prop, broke it down to base components and started over. Changed the dummy so he didn't grow, get rid of Egor and find another way to apply the gimmick and CERTAINLY get rid of the pants! It is that simple. Easy? Not so much. New music, new routine, new look and new presentation. All quite difficult. All requiring new timing. All expensive if you are paying to develop it. All necessary if you don't want to be laughed at, as opposed to with.

It’s the classic triangle with Good, Fast, Cheap at the points. You can only have two.

This magician chose Fast & Cheap, thereby precluding his act from being Good.

Yes fast and cheap rarely result in quality in much.

I'm not sure why that was an issue. Couldn't he have had the engineers send him the props blank and hired an artist to customize the props? Paint and engraving isn't particularly expensive or difficult. He could also go to a restoration place or other customizer.

There's a good chance those prop makers aren't the artsy type and didn't feel comfortable deviating from their templates.

Right? I think there was some discomfort and intimidation from my client knowing exactly what he wanted and was looking for, and a concern for the greater picture of additional things to come.

I just got off a coaching session last night with a client who has been working on putting together a show. For a few months we have been talking about the proper way to create a show. He was very interested and vested in doing this properly. He has been performing for about 5 years and through our discussions and him asking me to review and critique is performance videos, he has quickly come to the realization that he had just been stringing tricks together into what he "thought" was or what he "considered" to be a performance. Of course he also quickly admitted it was all from a me-based perspective, with little to do with the audience, market or industry.

Over the last few months we have dived deeper into such comprised elements such as your show has to be a match to your audience. Audience and market-match are the starting point (based on decisions he had previously made during the Foundational level). It has to have the components to a "show," the material, content, scripting/dialog, and through-story has to be audience appropriate, and then a few guidelines that I expect my students/clients to work within as structure and framework.

He has been understanding this quite well and was ready to start working on creating his new show. However, at this point he asked if he could create it on his own (without my help) and then bring it to be for review and critique. Although, not the way I would prefer him to do it, I agreed, and this week he brought me what he had been working on.

Interestingly enough, he came to our session with things that to him were unexpected. While the vast majority of his show and thinking about creating this show was about the performance material - the tricks, gags, lines, jokes, "moments" as he put it, audience interaction, etc., he noticed that he was looking at each trick independently on its own merit, and how that changed when trying to put it into a show with others. Flow was more difficult than he thought it would be, transitions were a big eyeopener, as was keeping the audience-match at every point throughout the process.

When I work with clients we start with the outcome in mind based on data determined, then go from there. Because of the way he wanted to do this, this didn't happen. It was interesting to see how much this approach and lack of the structured framework made such a difference for the worse. It lacked direction, purpose, and never seemed to be going anywhere. Especially not heading to anything (big payoff or climatic ending) but he final trick. As we reviewed it, he knew there were rough spots he had problems with, but he had no idea of how off the mark he was. It was not a good audience match, it certainly wasn't a market-match, and while it was better than what he had because it was by intentional design, it still wasn't what it could be or should be simply due to the way he went about it.

I applauded him for him wanting to try to attempt to do this on his own. He tried and made a good effort. However it was HIS realization in the aftermath of going over it, explaining what he thought were the problems areas and weak spots, and that it was still greatly lacking, that he decided to regroup, and re-approach this the way I would suggest - with the proper foundational elements in place, utilizing the proper framework, and working from the exact desired outcome backwards. We spent the final 15 minutes of our session laying this out for him and already he is breaking through to a much better designed performance.

It will be interesting to see how far he gets and the outcome in next weeks session. He said he now realizes that this takes much longer doing it the way he did it on his own and still wasn't right as he wanted it. He realized the many benefits of working with a mentor or coach and the huge difference it can make. What we accomplished in just he final 15 minutes not only got him excited, but set him on the right track for the exact outcome he is seeking. He also realizes how he may have never have gotten there on his own. It would likely have been an on-going continual (and prohibitive) work in progress that may never have gotten to what he wanted.

I was excited he realized these things on his own and I explained that THIS is part of the process...the process of creating a show. It is not as easy as one thinks, although he did say the few initial perimeters I gave him to work within kept him on track and ultimately made it easier and more disciplined as he proceeded.

I think this could be a good lesson and eye-opener for anyone when it comes to creating their show. I may follow up after he returns to me with his new efforts.

I just received a message from someone who informed me that this thread was being discussed on another prominent Magician's forum with great interest, with very nice things to say. I think that is great to know. I know members here are also members of other forums as well. While I think he was trying to get me to join their forum there too, it was more about the interest many magician's lack or are missing about both putting together a real show or performance and all it entails, versus just stringing together a half of a dozen or so tricks and thinking they have a "show" or "performance."

While I have been working with students, clients, and lecturing about this for years, there still is not any real decent materials or guidance on all of this for magicians from an industry perspective, not written by other magicians telling how "they did it" or "are doing it" (whether right or wrong.)

I applaud those identifying that they may not know what they are doing and are seeking assistance with this. I have said here hundreds of times my sayings "You don't know what you don't know" and the extended version "You don't know how much you don't know."

This is what Tricky Business is about at its best is focused helping other discover this and working them through the process. Glad to see how this is helping so many here and beyond.