SPOILER ALERT: In the fifth and final episode of The Magicians we collaborated with actress, television presenter and all round lovely person, Angela Griffin.
In our effort to bring you the most sophisticated, cutting edge, technological trickery possible we created a quasi-historical illusion, “The Red Carpet Illusion.” Using Infra-Red camera technology we used thermal imaging to reveal to you the secret behind this illusion, literally giving you x-ray vision so you could see how the trick worked.
Fortunately for you, dear viewers, if you look especially closely at the thermal feed you might be able to make out our testicles. Surely making us the only presenters not only to expose their trick but also, their balls on prime-time TV.
Anyone who attended our 08/09 show Powered by Demons will have recognised this re-worked version of our Spirit Cabinet sequence, a favourite of ours purely because we love ghosts with wandering hand syndrome, it’s much more interesting when they throw things.
In this episode we also developed a trick utilising YouTube, which you can see on this very blog here.
That’s it for this series of The Magicians, hope you had some Saturday night fun.
Look into the future and see someone else predicting the future! Here is a sneak peek at this weeks episode of The Magicians, behold the “Angela Griffin YouTube Prediction.” It’s episode 5, the last one! If you want to check out the video prediction for yourself, which really was posted 4 days before we performed the trick, find it on YouTube here.
See you tomorrow at 7pm on BBC one.
SPOILER ALERT: In episode 4 of The Magicians we teamed up with Spandau Ballet bassist and actor Martin Kemp. For the show we filmed one of the worlds coolest optical illusions. An illusion that plays with our sense of scale and position because of ‘forced perspective’. While not strictly a magic trick we asked Martin to wear two eye-patches (which, in case you are wondering, is what happens to every pirate when he gets an eye infection) and then to sit in a certain position and remove one patch. With the vision from one eye only, Martin got to experience this wonderful optical illusion without having to look through a camera lens. He even got to try out this illusion for himself…
The theme of the episode was ‘Fairytales’ and not content with simply taking a trick from an existing fairlytale, like turning a pumpkin into a turd, or whatever it was, we set about penning our very own tale. We called it “The Sorcerers Apprentice… Martin Kemp.” We look forward to it becoming an instant classic. I hope you enjoyed it, especially since I tore the muscles in my crotch performing it. No joke, it still hurts.
There were three highlights whilst making this episode and all involved Rolf Harris:
An interesting piece of trivia for you: Rolf and Chris genuinely were not healthy enough to perform the forfeit and Lenny was too large to fall back and be caught by the on-stage assistants. So the N-Dubz bodyguard was enlisted literally at the last second after they quickly had him change out of his jeans and into a pair of trousers that would fit.
Next week we do what no magician should do, not expose themselves in public but expose their illusions in public. We’ll literally take you backstage with us and our hugely talented partner, actor Angela Griffin.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could look into the future, take a snapshot of things that are yet to happen, then bring that snapshot back? Well we have done just that!
The crystal ball reveals Martin Kemp, N-Dubz and Rolf Harris… that can’t be right? Oh yes, it’s right. It’s very, very right.
SPOILER ALERT: For show number three we joined forces with comedian Stephen K. Amos. From the moment we met him until the moment we finished he constantly gave us shifty looks. Possibly because he was working on a magic show he never felt like he was being told the truth and was suspicious about pretty much all aspects of the show, including ourselves! Stephen considers himself a magic sceptic, so rather than be the guy who acts amazed he is the kind of person who is desperate to figure out how it’s done.
Invisible Machines Ltd staff 2011
The mouse trick genuinely was the first trick I ever learned. I inherited the trick from my Dad who had made one up from plans he saw in a magic book when he was a kid. The camel trick, however, was a first for us and a real challenge. The only other time we have worked with a camel was in Egypt when we filmed our “Tricks from the Bible” TV specials. Camels are big animals so making one appear was tough, with hindsight, the girl from the audience should have chosen that bloody snake!
Those of you who watch in HD and are eagle-eyed, cypher-solving loons, may have spotted the red buttons on our waistcoats. Despite their positions looking innocently random they actually are positioned to spell ‘B’ and ‘S’ in Braille on our respective torsos. Now there is no excuse to ever mix our names up.
B and S Braille waistcoats
To be honest I really thought that Chris Korn and Samantha Womack had the victory in the bag after making the entire audience doey-eyed for those rabbits, but somehow we managed to win for the first time this series! This meant that Chris Tarrant and Luis De Matos had to walk on broken glass and swords… I suspect the audience was full of people who had left “Who wants to be a Millionaire” with nothing.
In case any of you think the show is rigged, all the magicians practise the forfeit and go over the movements and camera blocking with the director and crew. The celebrities, however, do not. As you can see below I trained for the forfeit and used the swords as a lazy man’s way of removing dry skin from my heels.
Scottish sword dance
Next week we take Martin Kemp hostage, inspect the phenomena that Charles Fort called ‘Teleportation’ and attempt to create a fairytale for the 21st century.
SPOILER ALERT: In this episode we joined forces with comedian, musician and nutter Ade Edmondson. Ade was very interested to learn the secrets behind our craft and would laugh manically each time we taught him the deceptions he would be performing. He was great to work with, especially as he spent a lot of his early career as part of a double act, and so understood perfectly the dynamics that we wanted to achieve.
He really got into smashing the watches, so much in fact that, with the aid of a sledgehammer, he managed to embed a watch into the wooden floor of Stage D at Pinewood Studios. If the watch isn’t still there now, there will certainly be a watch-shaped hole where it was.
The car trick was fun to perform mainly from an historical point of view. Those of you who know your magical history will understand why we got a kick out of that particular illusion and along the way we learned exactly why hardly anybody does it!
TV sets are always so different to work on than stages. You can never really get a true sense of the space from looking at the cardboard mock-up before the set is built. I remember visualising doing the ‘x-ray machine’ on set just from looking at the little cardboard model and realised how different my visualisation was when we finally did it for real.
Despite Chris Korn making a car fly and producing a helicopter, he faced the forfeit, consequently having a motorbike drive over him and Amanda Byram. Seated beside me on ‘the throne’, Peter Jones was clearly very pleased that he wasn’t the one lying on a bed of nails. He told me it was something he “had no intention of trying”. Ade, however, wanted Chris and Amanda to suffer, even calling out “that’s cheating” when they donned the protective gear on their arms… how very friendly!
Next week we try and flog “The Digi-Cloth” and the “Achilles 3000″ with Stephen K. Amos.
The mind reading helmet may also cause brain damage
SPOILER ALERT: In this episode we were paired with BBC Breakfast presenter Sian Williams. Sian wanted to do something that would not embarrass her teenage boys, hopefully we succeeded in toughening her up a bit. We visited a sweetshop where she put her fist through Stuart’s stomach. We then taught her, and every member of the audience except one, how to read minds, as well as letting the audience in on the hard work that goes into a classic sword box illusion.
Whilst watching the other acts from ‘the thrones’, Bruno Tonioli made me laugh many times with comments that could never be broadcast and Ashley Banjo put most sleight of hand artists to shame by teaching me some of his finger dexterity work. I still can’t move my fingers like Diversity can, but now they all have carpal tunnel syndrome.
Barry fires a crossbow at Sian Williams
The crossbow stunt proved to be more tricky than we could have thought. Initially we wanted strings on the bolts because they move so fast that on camera you have to watch in slow motion to see them travel. In tests however, the moment a tail was put onto the bolts their flightpath became very unpredictable. One bolt went in the box, the tail was snagged and it was deflected up and over the protective surface placed behind the box. Luckily it was just a test and the box was unoccupied at the time. So in the interest of everyone’s safety the tails were abandoned.
Despite Sian’s ability to dodge crossbow bolts we were faced with the forfeit and had to put mind over matter and teach Sian to walk on hot coals. There must have been lots of Americans and Portuguese in the studio perhaps?!
In the next episode we’ll create some anarchy with Ade Edmondson.
This week I made possibly the geekiest thing ever. It is a deck of cards that are marked on the back. They aren’t marked by traditional tiny hidden markings on the corners however, the entire back of the card is marked by a QR code.
A QR code is a type of bar-code that is commonly scanned by mobile phones to exchange contact information, urls or as is the case here, text.
If you want to see what card lies face down on the table, you get out your mobile phone, launch your favourite bar-code scanning app, point the camera on the back of the card and then you will get a message stating the exact name of the card.
Want to try it? Get out your phone and see if you can use it decipher the cards below.
If you come and participate in our séance, currently running at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, you might, as the poster suggests, be asked to use a Ouija Board.
What exactly is a Ouija Board? Is it an ancient demonic tool, crafted by Satan himself to allow us to communicate with the other side? Or is it merely an innocent toy that has been grossly misinterpreted?
“The Talking Board,” or as it is more commonly known “Ouija Board,” is actually a fairly recent invention. American businessmen Elijah Jefferson Bond and Charles Kennard patented the first board with letters on it to be sold with a planchette (the pointing device you put on the board) in 1890. A keen inventor, Bond also trademarked the word ‘Nirvana’ and invented a steam boiler. In fact, he would have made an excellent addition to “Dragon’s Den.”
In 1901, an employee of Kennard, William Fuld took over production of the talking boards and marketed them under the name “ouija” from the French and German words for yes, oui-ja. The board grew in popularity from the 1920s-1960s and many similar boards were marketed by Fuld’s competitors. He filed several lawsuits at other companies who were using the term ‘ouija’ in their marketing. Fuld reinvented the history of the board and anounced that he alone devised it.
The true origin of the board, however, is claimed by Fuld’s rivals to date back much further in history. Fuji is a form of automatic writing from China first appearing on record in 1100 BC. With Fuji, no board is used, instead a large planchette with a pencil attached is placed onto paper and when the planchette moves it creates letters, pictures or symbols. This apparently was the inspiration for Bond’s invention.
Years of ghost stories, horror movies and tales of people opening doorways to the other side through improper use of the board has led many to believe that the board should not be sold as a toy. Despite this, Parker Brothers, who bought the rights to the Ouija Board in the 1960s, market many variations of the original design, including a lovely pink edition designed for teenage girls who want to find out if the spirits can give them a date for the night.
An interview we gave to spoonfed.co.uk is featured on their site today. The interview is about the séances that we are conducting at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In it we mention that we captured a sort of human looking shape on camera during a recording of a preview. We thought we would post the image on the blog here so you can tell us what you think of it.
For us, as sceptical magician types, we know that the shape is just a glint of light against the camera lens. It only lasted for a second and in any of the other 24 frames in that second this is the only one in which it took a form which was vaguely human. But it is interesting how the brain wants to take random patterns of light like this and make something meaningful from them. Here is the image.
To see the full interview click here.
Satanic Messages in Kids’ Cartoons Oct 4, 2008
Marley Fish Feb 13, 2012
The Magicians Episode 5 Behind the Scenes Jan 31, 2011
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