Apollo Robbins and Shoot Ogawa have DVD's that are pretty much magic without a presentation.
Magic without words is not magic without presentation. I've seen Shoot Ogawa in person and everything about how he performs is his presentation. Same with Apollo Robbins. Their body language, facial expressions, and bearing are their presentations in this case.
So if you dont have an idea of performing this trick and you dont find some good presentations, e.g. on youtube, what would you do?
I don't perform it.
I have tricks I've been sitting on for ages which I have never once performed because I haven't personalized them. We don't need tons of tricks. For a long time, the only things I performed were reading a card out of someone's mind, and a coin bend. Those were two tricks I had put a lot of effort into, and therefore the only tricks I would do. Nothing else got the reactions I wanted, so I didn't do them.
Pick one trick and make it yours. Don't try to shoehorn a story onto a card trick just to do something other than tell people what you've just done. Which, by the way, I think is a large part of your problem. You just listed a bunch of card tricks. Card tricks are really hard to give a good presentation to because they are inherently meaningless.
Your presentations have to fit you and your charter. Many of my effects are stories that use magic as the illustration of the story. I'm a story teller who doesn't even seem to know that the magic is happening, it just happens. BTW youtube would really be the last place I look for presentations. You have to make the effect your own.
I agree with everything he said.
yes and no. When I'm working on a effect in conjunction to practicing the moves ect I am thinking about a presentation. Usually by the time I have the moves down I will have a rough presentational idea, and I do mean rough. When I'm at that stage I will start performing it in casual situations, when I have friends round or am with mates at a bar ect. It is during these performances that I start to really tighten the presentation. I believe that misdirection timing ect all go hand in hand with presentation and you can't really start practicing that until you start performing for real people (its easy to misdirect yourself practicing in the mirror, but will that timing work on real audiences?). So the 'presentation' I start out with will change sometimes into something completely different to what I started out with.
I don't know your skill level, but I can absolutely script misdirection into the first performance without having to try it before hand. Perhaps I have just focused in a different direction. I know what misdirects people and further - a good presentation is misdirection in itself.
Now, that's not to say my presentations are set in stone. I completely agree with you in that the performance must evolve and improve over time. As you study more methods and performance theory, you can create a better performance. Taking bits and pieces from different presentations, coming up with your own thing, this is how you create miracles. But I think it's far better to start with something that you've already put the work of creating a good presentation into, than to just get the mechanics down and wing it from there.
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