The Experiences Part 1: Quickies

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This week, I have a three part series for you on a new way that I’ve been categorizing effects.

It’s not a system based on what’s used during the tricks (e.g., card tricks, coin tricks) or the setting in which the effect is performed (e.g., stage or close-up) or anything like that.

This categorization system is based on three types of experiences I enjoy having with the spectators through magic.

What is the value of categorizing effects in the way I’m going to explain in these three posts? Well, I’ve found these three experiences to be the best types of interactions I’m capable of having with people through magic.

And, I’ve found when I have a trick that is methodologically-sound, but just isn’t quite working for some reason or another, it’s often because the experience of the trick doesn’t fall into one of these categories. Sometimes a trick is like having smoked brisket for breakfast or getting a 30-second back massage. These things aren’t bad, necessarily, there’s just something off about the experience. Brisket enjoyed with friends on a summer evening, or a 45-minute back massage, is going to have a profoundly different (and stronger) effect on people because that’s the right experience for those things.

The first experience I want to talk about…

The Quickie

Quickies should be:

  • Visual tricks

  • With little set-up

  • That are ideally under 30 seconds.

Example

I’m at my friend’s place, and we’re helping her daughter put together a craft for Christmas.

At one point, I pick up the glue and put a little in my palm. “I used to do this when I was a kid all the time.” I dip my finger in the glue and let it stretch and drip from my finger. After a moment, I spin the glue around the end of my finger, where it forms into a solid white ring. I pop it on my thumb where it lives the rest of the night.

This is, as you probably know, Tobias Dostal’s Liquify.

This is a great trick for a quick visual moment.

But if you were to try to expand this into a three-minute routine, you’d likely have something bloated and poorly paced. Something that put so much focus on that final transformation that you’re giving people time to consider and anticipate gimmicks and sleight-of-hand.

You’d be taking a trippy, visual moment and turning into this overly-planned trick climax. And putting too much emphasis on something that is usually kind of stupid if you think about it. (Turning glue into a ring, for example.)

What Quickies are Good For

  • Capturing people’s eyes and attention.

  • Making them question what they saw.

  • Creating a unique visual memory for them

  • Engaging people who might not sit for a longer piece of magic.

What Quickies Aren’t Good For

  • Creating a real “magical” feeling in the spectator. It’s over too quickly for that.

I don’t stock up my repertoire with a ton of different quickies. I’ll have 5-10 that I make sure I work on regularly.

You don’t want to do them too often. The primary value of the Quickie is the shock of this weird thing happening out of nowhere. If you make this your “thing”—to surprise people with weird visual moments—they will soon be less and less surprised.

When I was 11-years-old, a 16-year-old girl pulled me into her backyard and flashed me her boobs behind a garden shed. That experience is burned in my brain, primarily because of the shock of it. I can’t say I have a detailed memory of anything else about that girl, but the memory of that experience as a whole is as strong as most any from my childhood, in a large part because it was so unexpected.

That’s what we’re going for with Quickies. Not the most fooling, strongest magic. But an unexpected concentrated moment of something impossible or surreal, that feels like nothing they’ve seen before.