This thread is 7 years old, so a lot of the participants have gone away by now. But even back then it was pretty clear that it was a combination of the Balducci Levitation and playing games with camera tricks while he is suspended by a crane.
“David Blaine-A Legend In His Own Cutting Room”
I’m pretty sure it would get out, too. And hey, look at that, it did!
I mean, seriously, what do you think the rest of this thread was, but one example among a great many of it “getting out”?
Well, actually, Blaine is infamous for doing this to an absurd degree, and is largely thought of as a hack in the magic community. There actually is a level of professionalism in magic where, if you say you aren’t going to use confederates or camera tricks, you don’t. Only once the patter starts (or when “explaining a trick”) can you lie.
It used to be a standard saying that “this magic trick was performed exactly as you see - no camera cuts or other video tricks”. (In fact, the old Bill Bixby series “The Magician” explicitly said so in its opening credits.
Today we see evidence of those who exploit this belief. Criss Angel, I thought, was moreso than Blaine the most notorious for having cranes, plants, fake audiences, multiple cuts and such.
I actually wondered how he did those “I’m burning this paper and by putting out the flames I will find the same name written on my arm” tricks, but if others are reading over someone’s shoulder and telling him what to write - hey, that makes it easy.
I saw Blaine in his block of ice in Times Square. That to me is more about his tricks - amzing feats that push the limits of the human body; or more likely “why would anyone bother?” My favourite story was the Glass box in London, where people would come and eat big macs beside it or one guy was trying to hit it with golf balls and a driver. No respect… 
There’s nothing wrong with a magician saying he doesn’t use confederates and then using them. What annoys magicians and everyone else is using camera tricks. If you can’t do it for a live audience, then it isn’t magic.
Magic is what he does in your mind, not his.
I’d also amend that to say that the majority of the apparent audience must be real audience. If the magician is standing on stage in front of 100 other people, and 99 of them are confederates, it’s not a magic trick any more. A small handful of confederates, though, is perfectly acceptable.
That is reasonable.
What’s a “confederate” in this context, exactly? Are we talking about someone acting like an audience member who has had their number guessed right or something? If so, I don’t see how I could be happy that a magician used a confederate. But is that not what is meant?
To me, it’s only a good trick if, after finding out how it was done, I would feel like a great joke had been played on my senses.
Like, I mean, I’d only feel like it was a good trick if I had the feeling that I’d have been able to spot it if I knew how to use my eyes (and, on the occasions when it’s appropriate, my other senses) more skillfully. Spotting a confederate wouldn’t be something I could do with skillful use of my sense organs though–it would require skill use of knowledge of psychology and facial reflexes and whatever else goes into lie detection.
There’s one trick where I think it’s Blaine (not Angel) who is walking down the street and does the “pick a card” routine. He then throws the deck agiantst the window of a cafe, and the selected card is stuck to the inside of the window. Basically, the “confederate” is one of the people sitting at a table just inside, who manages to stick the card on the window while everyone is misdirected.
OTOH, Criss Angel IIRC does the “Pull a girl in half” routine. On some spoiler website I saw, the comments were that much of the audience is recognizable as extras that appear over and over in his street wandering. The girl has actually been on Oprah, she has no legs or vestigal ones. In this routine, she is wearing fake legs - which a real audience volunteer probably would have noticed immediately. Chris just unhooks them so the pull takes them off.
If he’d done it with a real audience and a “fake girl” maybe, but when the whole thing is basically a movie shoot with extras - no, its not magic, it’s camerawork.
It’s a tough call. Some people would say if it’s entertaining then it’s fine. The case Chronos talks about has questionable entertainment value if it takes 99 confederates to entertain one person. As a magician, I wouldn’t respect a magician whose only trick is to use confederates. And since I’m not much of a magician, that should be really insulting to them. But if they are entertaining, and aren’t pulling a scam, I wouldn’t say they’re doing quite the same thing as TV magicians who rely on video tricks, but it’s damn close. Certainly someone like Uri Geller who claims to have special powers conferred by aliens is nothing but a scammer. But Kreskin relied heavily on confederates in his act, didn’t claim magical powers (though like Derren Brown exagerrated his use of psychology), and was considered to be entertaining by many. It’s in the borderline area I guess.
The problem is Criss Angel, for example, is simply a video showman using a camera to put together a show of camera tricks. Unfortunately, audiences have been conditioned over the years by real magicians to expect - if it’s magic and on TV, you are seeing it exactly how it happened without camera tricks; exactly what you would see sitting in the audience. A video trickster simply exploits that belief. When the truth becomes known, all they’ve done is ruin the TV business for real magicians, since from here forward people will assume everyone is pulling an Angel trick.
Look at the video of Blaine levitating. There’s several instaces of him levitating upward. In all cases, he encourages his apparently real non-plant audience to stand in a particular spot so they only get the one angle. I watched the video and swore that he was a foot or more off the ground - despite jerky camera work. then I replayed it frame by frame, and in fact he is either using the toe trick or the fake leg trick (front of pants slit, fake leg, puts foot out in front out of view). Much better street theatre than Angel - but it’s all in the delivery, the guy seems freaky but the basic tricks are what others have been doing for years.
As for confederates - well, you expect the girl who disappears or gets sawn in half to be in on the trick. Throwing a card through a plate glass window by simply having the guy on the other side stick it there - well that’s pretty obvious, the trick is that you didn’t see it due to misdirection, and he “forced” the right card.
If I saw a magician choose an audience member, called him up to the stage, and guessed a number from that audience member, I would immediately assume that the audience member was a plant. I also wouldn’t think very highly of the magician’s skills, since the way he did it would be so obvious. The pros would almost never do something so simple: They’d choose the audience member in a way that appears to be random, or they’d repeat the trick for dozens of different audience member (one or two of which might be plants, but not all of them), or they’d have the audience member pick the number to be guessed in a way that appeared to be random, or some combination of all of these.
Although, there are exceptions to every rule. I saw a show once where the magician called up a lady from the audience, and proceeded to “read the psychic impressions” or some such off of her watch. It started off looking like fairly standard cold-reading stuff: “This watch was given to you by someone special in your life”, and so on, but culminated with “Your husband who gave you this watch is here in the theater, isn’t he? He’s on this stage right now? Your husband is me?”. OK, so it wasn’t much of a magic trick per se, but it was funny.
And that’s an example of the entertainment factor. The Amazing Jonathan is a great magician even though he does nothing perplexing in his tricks. Lance Burton does the best disappearing bird cage I’ve ever seen. Everyone knows it collapses and goes up his sleeve, but he does it so well you couldn’t get a clue by watching it. Many of Houdini’s escapes were done with confederates and trick equipment, but the magic was his showmanship.
The question, I guess, is “what is the trick, how clever is it?” If the magician asks an audience member to write a number on a paper, and the guy is a plant with a pre-arranged number, where’s the “magic”? If at least the person is a real audience member and picks a card out of a deck, it’s a bit more of a trick.
(Of course, there’s the episode of the Big Bang Theory where they use this card trick on Sheldon, over and over, and he can’t figure it out.)
“Sometimes magic sounds like tape!”
Criss Angel and David Blaine are not magicians. They create images on videotape, and deserve credit for nothing more.