For Magicians: Questions to Ask Yourself When Adapting Your Magic for Virtual Magic Shows to In Person Magic Shows (or Vice Versa)

Hello wonderful readers, it is such an honor to be returning to my blog with a monthly column on virtual magic. It is especially auspicious that this particular article will be coming out the same month that my Penguin Live Lecture on virtual magic is being released. Thank you for reading, and if you enjoy my content here, I hope you’ll give my Penguin Lecture a watch as well. This month I’d like to discuss a few questions you can ask yourself when adapting your magic to work for both live and virtual audiences. Whether you are one of the magicians that dove into performing virtual shows at the height of the pandemic or you are someone who has never signed on to a zoom meeting in your life, you may find yourself in a situation where you have to modify your magic to suit a new platform. I hope that some of the questions you can ponder below will be able to aid you in doing so.

Many virtual entertainers like Helder Guimarães, Carissa Hendrix, Tim Ellis, and Ben Seidman have worked extremely hard and have created amazingly engaging and original virtual magic shows. Like diamonds, these virtual magic shows have been tirelessly shaped and molded under pressure.

However, now that the world is opening up again, virtual magicians are getting inquiries for live shows, and if you’re like me, you probably don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The last thing you want to do after working on material is discarding those diamonds you’ve made and starting all over from scratch. Alternatively, if you’re late to join the virtual party, you may be pleased to know how you can modify the wonderful things that you already perform in a live show to work for a virtual audience. So let’s jump right in!

Ask Yourself: Is the effect possible in this environment? If not, what’s lacking? What do I need to alter to make it possible for a virtual magic show?

These are important questions to ask because when you break down your virtual magic show and tricks into their fundamental parts, you may notice that in fact only one or two concepts need to change for your effect to work in a different environment. This also helps you narrow down the issues so you can focus on more bite-sized and actionable problems like coming up with different ways to force a card without the audience touching the deck or finding a new way to make something disappear when you are no longer sitting in front of your computer and can’t just casually lap something below the camera’s view.

You can often keep your entire script, jokes, and premise but change one or two little details and your effect could be perfect for a virtual show or in person affair. For example, say you have a virtual magic trick with a music prediction that needs to be adapted for a stage performance. First you force a song using a SvenPad and have a spectator call out stop as you flip through the pages. Once the song is freely chosen, you then reveal that you have predicted the randomly chosen song all along when you added a link into the group chat before the trick began. Everyone in the video chat can then click the link themselves and the music video for that particular song pops up on all of their computers at home. That’s pretty interactive and gets everyone involved in the show as they all get to click the link and see the reveal on their own laptops. However, that wouldn’t be ideal for an in person audience, so you’d need to change parts of it to make it more powerful.

The problem here isn’t the trick itself, the script, or even the method for forcing the song in the beginning. If you break down all the elements in this specific piece, the reveal of the prediction is what needs to be changed. You could fix this a number of ways, perhaps texting the link to a volunteer and having them come up to the stage and hold their phone to a microphone so everyone could hear the song together. Or, why not show your personality and love of vinyl by having a record player on stage the entire time that is set to play only one song (their randomly chosen one). You could even be extremely extravagant and have a giant cardboard cutout of the singer revealed on stage with confetti cannons while their chosen song is playing over the speaker system. The possibilities are literally endless. But you can’t brainstorm solutions until you ask yourself what’s not working, break it down, and isolate the part of your magic trick that needs to be changed.

What do I need from my volunteers and audience as a virtual magician? Is there a way to make this effect more interactive in this version?

What if you want to adapt an in person magic trick to a virtual magician show? You may need to change up how you’re having your audience members participate. If you need to have a volunteer make a choice like picking a card or grabbing something you can modify your presentation in a number of ways to make it work virtually. For one of my tricks I’ve adapted my audience participation to work for virtual by changing the pieces of paper in my force bag to be multiple colors (10 different colors) instead of all the same shade of white. For this trick, first you would get suggestions from the audience, then quickly write their answers down on the colored pieces of paper, put them in a switch bag, mix them up and empty the bag onto your table with the forced item written on all of the colored papers. You can then ask a volunteer on screen to pick a specific paper by picking a color and then you can open that colored piece of paper to reveal the forced item. This works as a great alternative to having them literally reach into the bag. They are still making a completely free choice because out of all the colors, they are choosing a specific paper.

Maybe your effect is more passive to watch and you don’t need your audience directly influencing the magic. It still might be fun to think of ways you can get them involved during a virtual magician performance, such as having them wiggle their fingers at the screen or you could ask a volunteer to share their favorite magical word that you then use to create the magic. The more you can engage the audience and get them involved, the better.

I hope that these examples, questions and effects have given you new ideas to get inspired and think of ways you can mix up your own material and create adaptable tricks that are appropriate for any situation whether it be on stage or online. Thanks for reading and see you next month!