Magic Tricks

This was my first time purchasing a Tarbell course of Dan Harlan's and I was impressed with the amount of information he crams into a span of a few hours. It felt a lot like reading the Tarbell where you get the core of the method and have to figure out what is going to fit with your performance style. There are only a few things I wish that they had done differently about the course in general:

1. I wish that they had some audience reaction shots. About half of the fun of magic is seeing how people react and what drives them crazy. Often as magicians, we get jaded to certain techniques that still totally fry spectators while others that we are impressed with because of the amount of skill they require to perform are just simple riddles that audiences are not quite impressed by. To get a sense of what's really frying them it would be nice to see the reaction of the crowd. This includes micing the audience. It feels so empty because we're relying on a lavalier from Dan and it's hard to tell what is and isn't working or to at least get a sense of the actual timing.

2. The audio for the silent pieces is often replaced with a different audio track and it kind of kills the energy of the performance. I guess it's a similar note to the first comment but still worth mentioning.

3. The explanations are very fast and lack some good close up angles. Tarbell courses are really meant to give you a jumping off point in my experience and then you really learn the trick as you do it. If you're going to learn 8 or 9 serious routines in a couple hours then it's going to have to move quickly, but if you've ever bought a DVD or Download where they go over 1 trick for 60-90 minutes you'll realize that by the end of the dvd you feel like you can do the trick without ever actually practicing it because you've seen it from every angle 18 times. That doesn't happen here and while I appreciate the brevity of the explanations, it would be nice once and a while to get more close-ups, over the shoulder angles and overhead shots where certain construction or techniques might benefit from it.

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One thing that I heard here that was absolute GOLD though and worth the entire price of the series was something Dan said in passing. He mentioned that he read people's comments online (assuming YouTube) when he decided how to routine his sub-trunk and found that most people guessed the method. What a stroke of genius. I started going to YouTube and seeing what kind of comments people left on other routines.

For example, I was debating on whether or not to put a thumbtie routine into my act because I couldn't tell if it was strong enough. I found a video online of someone doing a thumbtie somewhat poorly and people started guessing that all of the penetrations where done with fake sticks and props - that's when I realized this was a plot that people are really stumped by. Within seconds I purchased Dan's thumbtie Tarbell course (which is fantastic!) and started figuring out which method would suit me best.