"Video Chat Magic Will Never Take Off..."
(12 Minute Read)
When we (Steve and Will) told magician friends about our interest in magic over video chat some were enthusiastic about the possibilities, but some claimed it simply can’t be done. They said:
You can do a few tricks online, but actually entertaining people is a different story. Online performances are no substitute for in person interaction.
This attitude is entirely understandable, but it won’t help us to uncover the possibilities for magic that video chat affords. We, the authors, have both been surprised in our own journeys to realising the possibilities of the medium, and this article sets out why we are optimistic for the future of video chat magic, how we think it can best be approached, and some of the benefits that we can already see for it, just a few short weeks into our explorations.
Reframing the Problem
It may be fairly easy to do a trick on video chat, but entertaining people is not so straight forward. In fact, the latter is a huge challenge and we undoubtedly have a long way to go before we are as effective with video chat magic as we are when we are in the same physical space as our audience, but maybe that is no surprise…
For well over one hundred years magicians have had magic clubs, conjuring magazines, and specialist literature, not to mention the more recent additions of conventions, dvds, online forums, and online lectures. All these things have been used as tools with which magicians have explored, shared and learned how to give the most effective in-person performances possible. There is practically no way to perform in-person magic today without benefitting from the thinking and knowledge that has accumulated in this now vast area. And despite a huge amount of communal thought, work, and development, one of the things magicians most often discuss about their live work is how to turn their tricks into entertaining magical experiences for their audiences.
The problem is the same when it comes to video chat magic, but the timeframe is very different. Video chat itself is very new, and until now (May 2020) there has been little momentum behind its wholescale deployment. In the last month or so, work meetings, social gatherings, and even religious rituals have migrated to video chat. Huge businesses, in particular, are investing heavily in figuring out how to make this medium work. As of yet, they haven’t particularly succeeded. It is not surprising, therefore, that magician’s first attempts within this new medium feel clunky and ineffective.
Someone could quite rightly say something like the quote we used to start this article...
Sure, you can do a few tricks online, but actually entertaining people is a different story. Online performances are no substitute for in-person interaction.
… but perhaps a more balanced approach is possible.
Sure, after a few week’s work you can do a few tricks online, but actually entertaining people is a different story. These new online performances are no substitute for the in-person interactions we have spent hundreds of years developing.
Video chat performances are certainly not as good as in-person ones yet. But the fact that we are not as good at something that is essentially brand new as something we have been working on for a long time should hardly be a surprise. The real questions are what approaches will help us develop, and how can we accelerate that development?
The speed of development online, and specifically the improvements in the ways people engage with one another, offer good reasons to be hopeful. The first Youtube clip ever posted was in 2005 and was 19 seconds long. The poster states that elephant trunks are really, really, really long. That’s it.
It’s not exactly quality entertainment, let alone something that really makes a connection. But things have developed since then, and, predictably, we’ve seen significant improvement. Even a brief search on YouTube today will reveal quality content specifically produced for a YouTube audience that actively engages with millions. From the world magic, Richard Wiseman, for example, has built an audience of 2.1 million subscribers for his Quirkology channel. Younger magicians will recognise the names of Peter McKinnon and Chris Ramsay who command audiences of 4.69 and 3.89 million subscribers respectively. And these numbers pale in comparison to the three most popular YouTube channels in the world who's combined subscribers represent over 5% of the entire planet’s population! Given that YouTube is only 15years old, this is a pretty remarkable development.
Within the world of video chat magic we are right at the start of the journey, a few small steps beyond posting videos of elephants with commentary on their ample appendages. But, in the past few weeks alone, the speed of discovery is awe-inspiring. And something which unites the people we see doing exciting things in this space is their approach.
If You Keep Doing What You’ve Always Done...
Perhaps the first thing anyone who tries to do video chat magic does is to look at their in-person repertoire and see which tricks might still work via video chat. “My ambitious card will still work if I sign it rather than get them to.” “Sponge balls can be super visual.” “Invisible deck is always surefire, I can involve everyone in the selection.” Unfortunately, there is a big problem with this approach. If we select our material for video chat performances by trying to minimise the compromises to our existing repertoire, the one thing we are guaranteed is compromised material. The very best case with this approach is that our video chat performances are a weaker substitute for our in-person ones. A much more productive approach is to think of video chat as an entirely new performance space.
A great close-up trick won’t work as well on stage. Just as a great stage trick won’t work as well on TV. And a great trick for close-up, stage or TV won’t work as well on video chat. As with every other type of performance space, the best way to develop magic for video chat is to think about the space’s unique advantages, disadvantages, and opportunities. Only when we do this, will we create the best version of what entertaining magic over video chat can be.
Ten Examples
This is all well and good, but perhaps it is helpful to have some examples of areas in which video chat offers greater potential for magic than other performance spaces.
1) How You Look
Obviously, you’re a magician, not a model, and you’re not even slightly vain. Even so, you might like to know that Zoom and other video chat platforms have a ‘touch up my appearance’ setting that smoothes out those wrinkles. You can also enable the HD camera setting so your picture will look way better than anyone else's. These two simple steps, plus investment in good lighting, will pretty much guarantee that you will both look your best and look significantly better than everyone else at your show. You will certainly look better than you do after two back-to-back gigs in a hot & sweaty banquet hall! One of the reasons celebrities are popular is that they only go outside looking better than normal people. Now you can easily make sure people only see you at your best too.
2) New and Powerful Methods Are Now Possible & Practical
We are only a few weeks into really exploring what’s possible over video chat, but already the methods and effects are way beyond what can be achieved in the flesh. Last week we experienced an ACAAN cleaner than anything we’d seen before... not only that, the kicker blew us away. It turned out the rest of the deck was blank! Taking advantage of the tools that video chat affords, we are capable of doing almost anything.
3) Distance
Obviously, there is a huge reduction in impact because we are not in the same room as our spectators, but there are some advantages to distance too. Finding someone’s card is rarely something that gets L&L reactions. But finding someone’s card in a well shuffled deck from halfway across the world... well that warrants a Dave freakout moment.
4) Environment
Remember getting changed and loading up your pockets in the disabled toilet, then competing to be heard with a band? That doesn’t happen via video chat. You can get everything ready in the privacy of your own home, with as many props as your like… and if you want to set up threads, cribs, accomplices, a teleprompter, camouflage, mirrors or accurate camera angles, then all these things are possible too! You can be seen and heard perfectly. You can determine exactly where people can and can’t look at any given moment. You can shape what they hear to give them the best possible experience, rather than struggle to be heard. And, best of all, you can make a huge poster with the Mnemonica Stack printed on it, so you don’t even have to look at your watch.
5) Interaction
Traditional TV, as well as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, have enabled magicians to share their performances with far larger audiences than could ever congregate in person. But these platforms differ from video chat in terms of interactivity. This is why we believe video chat magic has the potential to be even richer than YouTube. The potential for large audience numbers still exists with video chat magic but, unlike with TV, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, there is room for meaningful participation. This is because, unlike TV, video chat has been designed for real-time interaction.
6) Scale
Close-up magic is perhaps the strongest form of magic, in terms of its potential for memorable, deeply personal, mind-blowing moments. And, it’s often at its best when it happens in the person’s hands. Think sponge balls jumping into someone’s hand; it’s most powerful for that person, and slightly less impactful for the onlookers and less so again for a TV or YouTube audience observing the trick. With each of these steps in which the effect’s power is diluted, however, the audience size it reaches increases from 1 to a few to perhaps millions.
Share Magic Live by Vanishing Inc attracted over 30,000 attendees, and clearly demonstrated the scale of the opportunity. In the future, magicians will perform over video chat, not just to individual people on the other side of the world, but to large audiences dispersed across the globe, and they may even find ways to do this whilst maintaining the kind of live interaction that traditionally only existed in close up.
Magic via video chat might currently be largely in the low impact/low numbers portion of the above chart, but it has the potential to develop to a point where it achieves the impact of close-up magic while at the same time achieving audience sizes traditionally only found on stage or even TV.
7) Your Face
If you think about some of the greatest moments in the history of film, it’s often a combination of a close-up shot of someone’s face and a subtle and brilliant piece of acting. Close-ups can be hilarious, revealing, saddening and wonderfully human. They enable the storyteller to really affect an audience. And now, with video chat, the potential exists to leverage this dramatic device. That moment when you’ve supposedly messed up a trick is usually hard to communicate well. In theatre actors are taught to overexpress, which makes sense because their face is the size of a pea to everyone but the front row. But when you want people to actually believe you’ve cocked up, a close-up shot of an expressionless silent pause can be far more convincing and human. And on video chat, you can have a large, interacting audience experience those close-ups, and frame them exactly how you want, each time.
8) Their Face
Some of the most memorable moments in a magic show are watching audience reactions, and performers like Derren Brown have long taken advantage of this, even in live theatre shows. In the Q&A section of his live shows, an audience member is asked to stand and Derren then seems to step into their mind, while their face is filmed and projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. What makes it great theatre is not that he gets things right. It’s not that we hear a few yeses from people in the crowd. It’s that we are able to look straight at the spectator’s face as they undergo this extraordinary experience and enjoy the unfolding drama. Every twitch, every nervous smile and every micro expression of disbelief is right there for everyone to enjoy. It is this camera shot, this show of human emotion, that is deeply entertaining. With video chat magic, in time, it may be possible to capture some of this impact by orchestrating when and how the spectators’ faces are seen at the various moments they react to your performance.
9) Re-Watches
With large audience performance spaces (TV, YouTube and Instagram) a big challenge is making the magic so fooling that it can survive being re-watched multiple times. With magic on video chat, we have the potential to perform to big audiences and minimise this issue, as the performances are presented in a way that is truly live, rather than pre-recorded.
10) Eye Contact
We all know eye contact is particularly important. Never before in live magic have performers been able to look each and every one of their audience members right in the eye at the exact same moment. During in-person performances, you can look out at the audience, but you can’t look them all in the eye. And you have to choose which portion you look at, at any given time. With video chat, if there is a moment you think would be enhanced by strong eye contact, you can give that to every single person who is taking part in the show.
Applied Examples
What do the points in this list offer in practice? Well, so far we have published three methodological items, and each is enhanced by some feature of this list.
Jackpot M&Ms would certainly suffer from re-watching on Youtube or TV, as the spectator might start to decode the language of the prediction, but the ephemeral nature of video chat removes this possibility, that would also not be present in person. At the same time, the impossibility of the trick is enhanced due to the distance between you and your spectator.
Stop! benefits from the distance between you and the spectator in the same way, but the effect is amplified as the effect doesn’t just occur between two people but between every member of your audience. In addition, the trick can be shot such that the person whose card is found is shown front and center as they deal through the cards. This means that, even with one hundred people on the call, every single audience member can enjoy the look of puzzlement on the card choser’s face when their selection is impossibly found, knowing they participated in making it happen.
MagicMask is clearly a new methodological possibility via video chat. Such technological wizardry is inconceivable in person, and on YouTube or TV an audience would likely suspect an edit of some sort, but the liveness of video chat allows us to take advantage of the technology without nearly such suspicion. In a sense, it is the best of both worlds. And because it literally allows you to predict anything (and more, with a little imagination), you can take advantage of the opportunity for meaningful live interaction with a large audience by making your prediction about something that actually matters to them.
And what would happen if you tried to build every point we have made in this article into a single performance piece? A piece designed to bring people together to create a meaningful connection. Perhaps you would end up with something like this:
Five extended families, dispersed around the globe, log into their Zoom accounts and watch as a sea of relatives and new faces fill their screen. They greet their aunts, brothers, grandnieces and stepfathers. For some it is dusk while for others it is late morning. Old and young mingle. Some callers are on a work break while others are at home huddled around the screen with their partners and kids. What unites them, though, is that they are all about to be connected by an impossible interactive experience.
Suddenly, the final caller in the group arrives, filling everyone’s screen with the kind of welcoming appearance that is normally only ever seen on TV. They thank everyone for coming and explain that they are a collector of stories. Not of fairy tales, but rather, the extraordinary stories of real people living real lives. The performer explains that they have been collecting precious tales, as they gesture to a beautiful looking book, resting on an otherwise empty shelf behind them. Gazing directly into each and every person’s eyes, they say: “I believe that every family has a story worthy of being shared all around the world. In fact, I know it.”
Each family is placed into a breakout room, away from the other callers and the performer, and invited to decide between them who amongst them will be the family’s story teller and what family tale they will share. They reminisce, they laugh and they connect. Returning to the main room, each family, in turn, tells a story. They share ridiculous coincidences, disappointments, brave struggles and past dreams. Hopeful stories, sad stories and funny stories. Tales of the mundane and tales of the extraordinary. And, as each family’s story teller talks, their face fills the screen.
The performer thanks everyone for taking part, and sharing something of themselves. “Before we all go,” they say, “can I show you my collection of stories?” With eyes twinkling and a smile tugging at the corners of their mouth, the performer takes the book from the shelf and moves closer to the camera.
As they do the title comes into view, Five Extraordinary Stories from Families Around the World. Opening the book, someone from the audience sees their image at the top of the page… With the book held up close to the camera, they read the first few lines underneath the image. They are the precise words that began the story they shared earlier in the show. Turning slowly through the pages of the book, the other families’ stories are all there too. “At the beginning of the call I told you that I knew that every one of your family stories was worth sharing,” says the performer. “I knew this because, before we even met, I had read each and everyone one of them.”
On one level, this could be described as a great piece of voice to text transcription software, a fast printer and an offscreen assistant, coupled with MagicMask, but on another, it has the potential to be a truly impossible piece of magic that would deeply connect, and resonate with, people all around the world.
Conclusion
Considering video chat as a new and distinct performance space, that can sit alongside close-up, stage, TV and YouTube, will allow us to approach this new kind of magic more productively. It will enable us to explore and unearth more of its unique benefits. These, in turn, will help us to design better experiences for our audiences in this new performance space.
Video chat performances are certainly not as good as in-person ones yet… but maybe not for long.
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I would love to know more about the ACAAN mentioned in the write-up. I have a couple thoughts for method...but can you point me in the right direction?