He has a webpage in his profile that explains his qualifications :). He is indeed the SDMB resident expert on things relating to stage magic, among other things.
Awesome! Thanks for the heads up, I’m off to take a peek.
A dude that would answer would be better.
I did it the safer way: I got the chosen card to the top of the deck, stuck a piece of gum on it, and then threw the entire deck either at the wall or ceiling. The top card would stick, every other one would fall down.
Obviously the answer man of this thread already did a disappearing act so I’ll just ask anyone and get the prevailing theories on this one trick of his I could never figure out. In the trick he gets a card inside a cop’s shoe. How the hell does that work? He has the cop pick a card then when he can’t find it in the deck he has the cop (reluctantly) take off his show and it’s in there.
Ooooh, I thought he misspelled it. I was referring to the practice of drinking too much gin at the karaoke bar. I was just wondering when the ‘season’ was.
More impressive was the Criss Angel version at a Vegas casino where the card appeared imbedded in the glass door. I had it on demand and watched it over and over and still have no idea how he pulled that off. There were people on both sides of the glass door the whole time.
That’s simply a rigged quarter that you can get from a good magic shop.
From what I understand, having looked up his tricks in the past (though still can’t find an explanation for the card in the shoe trick), he doesn’t force the person to pick the card he wants he just deftly shows the card to his assistant on the other side of the glass who has a duplicate deck. That person then attaches the duplicate card to the glass with magician’s wax or something similar and walks away.
That’s damn neat. No idea how that works.
I would guess that the girl is a plant, and that the card has been there the whole time. When he sprayed the cards at the door, he knocked away whatever was concealing it.
Just a stupid guess. I’m probably way off.
I’ve performed magic of various kinds all over the world for 20 years. Last year I even did a show for our own dear Dex and Ed Zotti, no less. By dint of this constant hard work, unswerving self-belief and dedication, I have achieved fame on a par with the Sistine Chapel floor and the Swiss Army spoon. I do indeed know lots of magicians, although not in the Biblical sense, and most of the really good ones are friends of mine (plus some who are frankly dreadful and a disgrace to the profession). One of my friends here in London is currently working with Blaine on stuff I can’t talk about.
Thanks for the kind words. I’m not sure I’m an expert on anything, but it’s true I know a thing or two about magic. This is largely because I’ve been studying the subject since I was six, an age at which I tragically failed to realise there would be far greater long-term benefits in studying something else, e.g. rock guitar, rocket science or the vagaries of the international currency trading system.
If I had to guess I think there is an opening between the glass and the molding around the glass so that if a card is flipped up into the opening it will fall between the two panes of glass. He knows which card in the deck to flip up higher than the rest simply by feel. You can see the card dropping into place at around 2:56.
Look, if I were in the crowd, I wouldn’t need any complicated stunt. I would never check all the windows and doors of a neighborhood in case someone shows me a card trick. The card could have been sitting on the glass for days. Esp when I’m used to seeing posters, flyers, hours posted on doors and windows…
Yah, but when he leads the whole crowd up to the glass and tells them what will happen and has them stand on either side of the glass… they would notice, definitely. The misdirection happens when he has them looking up at his hands, then the card appears down at knee level.
Before I saw it, I thought it might involve a plant, but I see no need for one. cmosdes explanation makes perfect sense.
I have yet to stumble on a trick I couldn’t figure out, but I have run into one with Darren Brown. I know his NLP style explanations are all bullshit (he’s even admitted such), but I can’t figure out this trick–unless nearly every single person involved in the trick is a plant.
While we’re on the subject, does anyone have any idea how Kevin James manages this? I used to assume the topmost gentleman was an amputee, but I’ve since seen the trick done with different people on top, so my best guess is that it’s two contortionists, and he’s simply switching between a fake pair of legs that the audience can inspect and a real guy who has to be carried at a specific angle to not ruin the effect.
I saw Chris Angel do a similiar one on his mindfreak show. It tripped me out!
Please tell me how he / they do this??
I am not a magician but I see a couple of problems with cmosdes guess. First of all there was never just one card flipped. But assuming he could get his hand on a certain card the first hard part would be getting it to hit at just the right spot. Then it would have to go in between the molding and the glass, turn a pretty tight radius and then continue downward all the while hoping another card from the flourish didn’t do the same thing.
But back to isolating the card. “Simply by feel”, really? Even if it’s possible while sputtering away the whole deck it could in no real sense be labeled as simple.
Then there’s the problem of of the glass. As a designer I’ve done some pretty tricky things with glass. Having a slot in that door without the seams showing is pretty much impossible in my experience.
Finally, if he did indeed pull off all of those things labeling him as a hack or a camera magician is highly dismissive. I’d love to hear ianzin’s version of the above guess.
You don’t see the card “drop” into place from the top, so I’m guessing that the door was rigged at the bottom. The bottom trim is plenty big enough to conceal a card and a mechanism to cause it to rise into place when triggered, such as an invisible thread and counterweight, or a spring and some sticky stuff to stop it at the right height, or something like that.
Then you just need a way to get the signed card into the mechanism. Easiest way is to pre-load: the girl is an accomplice who has already signed a card, which is put into the door before the trick even begins. Slightly more difficult would be slipping the card to another accomplice to load into the door before they approach it; since no one knows the door is part of the trick, no one will notice the guy opening the bottom trim and loading the card.
Criss Angel must have some good buddies at these casinos, because they let him set up some very elaborate rigs on the property. It appears that you can still go see the “card in the door” at the Luxor, as there are other videos of it. It’s pretty clear from the other videos that the door isn’t a single solid piece of glass.