Yeah, that was a bad one. Looking at the clouds behind the shuttle before and after made it painfully obvious that you weren’t looking at the same scene with only a shuttle missing.
In the end it’s about entertainment. I take ianzin’s point about ethics and a ‘shared understanding’ with the audience, but in the final analysis if spectators are entertained by an illusion what does it matter whether the illusion is achieved with stooges or by some other method? Certainly, in the former the audience would feel cheated if they knew how the trick had been done, but surely the whole point is that the audience don’t know, and don’t find out.
I saw a TV show where an illusionist revealed how he had made an airplane on the runway disappear. It was all achieved by camera angles. In other words the spectators that were actually present saw no illusion at all, only the TV audience.
Even that can be acceptable, if the presentation is good enough. I saw a show once where the magician “randomly” picked a volunteer from the audience, and asked to see a piece of jewelry she was wearing. He then cold-read his way through “This was a gift. It was given to you by someone special”, etc., culminating in “The person who gave this to you is your fiancee, isn’t he? He’s here right now, isn’t he? He’s me, right?” Given the presentation, it was actually pretty funny.
As for your Type 2 illusion, I don’t think there’s any problem with having some confederates posing as “audience”. But if you’re showing an audience, then at least some of them have to be legitimate, too-- I’d say half of them, at a bare minimum.
Not for me, really. The whole point of illusionism is cleverness and skills. I’m impressed by a trick that has needed hours of training and planning, but doing a Criss Angel, just shooting the scene again but this time with a dummy, having actors pretending to be a surprised audience and then editing it all together… well, I could do that. So could you. Where’s the fun in that?
That was The Amazing Jonathon. That particular routine was a spoof on mentalists and was hilarious. He is known for being a comedian who performs magic and his act reflects that.
As I said before, it comes down to a matter of opinion. There is no definitive answer. Some say it matters whether you are using a ‘legitimate’ method, and others say ‘who cares?’.
Although no comparison is ever 100% accurate, there are some parallels here with singers at live performances either singing live or just miming to a pre-recorded track. Most people seem to feel that it is ethically questionable for the singer to let the audience believe they are singing live if they are in fact just miming. But there are some people who honestly don’t care. There was some discussion in the news a while ago about a certain famous singer who was miming during some of the songs in her ‘live’ shows, and I read one fan saying, ‘Who cares? So long as it’s her voice on the backing track, what difference does it make?’ Not the majority opinion, but an opinion nonetheless.