Well, I wasn’t aware a space race was in progress. Which magician do you think will reach orbit first?
The clue to me that the “audience” is part of the show is that none of them block the camera, or get down to look underneath him (I certainly would).
I have seen the guy, he walks around Las Vegas filming his “man on the street” segments, and will say that is his real hair.
From the link:
:eek:
If I were going to perform this ‘stunt’ in a way that would look real on video, I’d simply fix up a thin steel wire across the field, to lean back onto. No need for fancy braces, anything mounted in the ground by my feet, or anything. Have a few people mill around, and edit the footage to include separate shots of ‘shocked’ onlookers. And to make sure it looked like you could walk right around without obstruction, the camera would go down the side of my body, being passed underneath the wire.
But then, as ianzin so helpfully points out, I could never know, because I’m not a real magician.
Never let it be said that magicians don’t suffer for their art. 
Pardon the hijack, but the classic magician’s trick of passing the hoop over the levitating lady- how is that done? (It’s so passe now that it has to be ripe for revelation.)
As for the guy above, it’s clear to me that HE’S THE DEVIL!
She’s on a table (note she always wears a flowing dress), supported by a strut which goes through the curtain at the back. The passing the hoop actually includes a flourish which moves the hoop around one end, across the front and around the other end, without ever passing completely along the rear of the table.
Interesting. Do tell! (for us non tv-watching souls)
…when I was a Banquets Captain at the SkyCity Conference Centre, we had a Circus for the staff in the Ballroom. There were a number of different acts, like clowns and monkeys and magic shows, and there was this one act where a pretty young lady appeared ( to the audience ) to levitate off the ground. Being “backstage”, I was standing in a position where I could see right up her skirt! (I wasn’t looking, honest! ) Suffice to say, without revealing what I saw, the trick was revealed for me, and ever since then, I’ve never tried to look up a magician’s skirt again… 
That is Criss Angel. I can’t get enough of him. In that segment, he also levitated a girl in the park, pretty much the same way you see it happening to him, IIRC.
I’ve never seen levitation that looked so believable. He’s INCREDIBLE.
There’s no need for a “drop-down” brace, since his right leg never moves. I think the hanging jacket is a deliberate misdirection. It looks a bit wrong, but it doesn’t quite reach the ground, and you can indeed see that there’s nothing there – but it draws your eye. That’s art.
If I were to attempt this trick, I’d try to do it like this:
A brace from the right foot to the small of the back, hinged at the knee, with a 90 degree range of motion. At the base, the brace has a socket arrangement that connects to a discreetly buried support in the ground through the heel of the shoe.
Once you contrive to fix the brace to the support, you get your assistants to gently lower you, bending at the knee until you are parallel to the ground (where the hinge’s range-of-motion ends.) Conscripts are okay at the hands, but you want someone you can trust at your head, so you don’t get hurt.
The brace give you solid support under one thigh. As an experiment, (and because no-one was around to see what I dumbass I was being) I did a little experiment using my freeweights: I loaded up a barbell with enough weight to counterbalance me, put it against the wall, laid one thigh on the end of my bench, hooked my foot under the barbell, leaned back, and then lifted the other leg (to the extent that I could.) I’m sure I looked a complete prat, and it was extremely discomforting to the foot that was taking all the weight, but it’s easy enough to balance that way, and of course it would be much easier if your heel was mechanically secured to the ground.
I probably shouldn’t have admitted that I tried that. Friday night at Mudd’s! Woo!
Anyway, everything about doing it that way would be trivially easy – the first trick would be to engineer a gimmick that securely attaches to the ground and can take the weight, and the difficult performance part of it would be keeping it concealed and managing to get it locked into position without being obvious about it.
Which I guess is to say that I agree with Bryan and Q.E.D..
For Pete’s sake, unless there’s video manipulation involved it’s obviously some sort of cleverly disguised brace. Why get all fussy about people trying to pick a part interesting magic tricks. That’s half the fun.
Ugh, please don’t let ianzin derail another illusionist thread.
I don’t think his audience was fake. He does his bits all over the streets of Vegas, stopping strangers on the streets to perform. Crowds gather, and they appear to be real. I also believe that is his real hair, but that was the first time I’d seen him in a hat.
The levitation at the park was a long segment that followed some Frisbie tricks. He was moving about freely then, bending and reaching to send and catch the Frisbie, but there is no telling how much time elapsed between takes.
I think you’d all have a better idea of what he’s about if you watch a show or two of his in its entirety. It really is different.
I have to agree somewhat with ianzin in that if it were really that easy to figure out how a magician did his tricks, then everyone would be doing them, and they really wouldn’t be tricks anymore. I think there is an incredible talent required to make people believe–a talent that involves physical strength and stamina, mind control, optical illusion, flexibility and a high pain threshold.
And charisma. Don’t forget charisma.
Not having seen the video here, the speculation is that there’s some kind of rod coming out of his pants that holds the shirt up?
Hell, that’s no mystery. I could do that trick and I don’t need a brace.
I just can’t do it in public since the restraining order.
Are the same crowds present in all shots? My observation of the crowds in this clip are that in the shots where he’s visible, they’re all standing around quite calm. There’s separate close-ups of the ‘gasp, hands over mouth’ variety, but there’s no evidence that these were filmed at the same time, whether actors or not. (David Blane uses exactly the same editing-in of ‘shocked onlookers’ all the time.)
Ooh, cool thread. I work on the show, so I know a little bit about this piece. 
No, I can’t/won’t tell how it’s done, that kills the fun of it. But I WILL use the opportunity to shamelessly plug the series (Wed nights at 10pm on A&E), and for those of you with no cable, the DVD of the series will be out later this year.
And yes, the reactions are taped at the same time as the effect with a 2nd camera. =)
Actually the best reaction was completely missed (darn that live, unscripted TV thing). A jogger in the park was watching as he jogged by… to the point where he fell over mid jog from not looking where he was going. Hehehe.
e.g. he levitates over a moving escalator; he rises up from the floor and onto a chair; he levitates a girl off the street (supposedly) with no part left touching the ground (it appears), he rises up over ten feet high in one shot–much higher than Blaine’s few inches with his back turned–lots of variations that imply that he might have a better method than the foot-attached-to-the ground method
He’s billed as “a postmodern Whodini” accurately if that tells you anything. Just watch one of his shows on A&E. You can read about it here.