Hello everyone! My name is Tyler Scott and I've been doing magic for about a year now.
As of this writing, I have been performing Doubting Thomas for a little under a year
So are you saying you came up with this pretty much as soon as you started doing magic? That in itself set off alarm bells...
...however, I'm not one for jumping to conclusions, so I watched the videos anyway, and here's what I thought:
I admire you spirit, but I really don't see what this brings to the table. There is nothing here that could not be accomplished using very, very basic sleight of hand. If anything this is less clean than sleight of hand versions.
When I post up my own original routines, I always appreciate the brutally honest feedback the most, so I'm hoping you're the same, so here goes:
-This obviously needs a duplicate coin. Most sleight of hand versions don't. So not impromptu.
- You show both hands empty at the start, but then have to place your left hand out of view before you do the trick. In a trick like this, your hands are essentially one of the props, so they should remain in view.
-When you bring the hand back, you seem to be holding it in a bit of cramped position. If that is the position the hand needs to be in, you may as well just be classic palming the coin.
-When you slam the coin down, you keep the right hand closed and then very quickly have to move both hands out of view again, presumably to enable a ditch of both the gimmick and the duplicate coin. Also, there's barely enough time for the effect to register. You stare at the coin in an attempt to misdirect from this fact, but the focus of the trick here should really be on you hands, not the coin. It's like doing cut and restored rope and insisting everyone look at the scissors. The hands are the important thing here, and there are removed from the performance 'zone' way to quickly.
-The effect is so minor, i'm not sure why anyone would want to carry a gimmick around to perform it.
It is much simpler than learning complex sleight of hand techniques that leave the potential to get caught.
A false transfer and a classic palm is unlikely to be considered 'complex sleight of hand' in anyone's book.Not sure why that would leave you more open to being caught either. It's much easy to palm one coin for a few seconds whilst pretending it is in the other hand than it is to have to perform a steal, palm both a gimmick and a duplicate coin, then hide a second coin and do a ditch, all whilst the focus should be on your hands. If anything, it looks like both hands are dirty right after the penetration. This is when people are going to want to look at your hands.
Again, I admire you spirit, and always admire attempts to create, but with just a year in magic, I'm not this will be worth anyones time.
What I did like: You performance manner is great. Your videography and editing skills are also fantastic. The trailer looks like it was made by an experience professional. You could certainly have a career producing magic videos for other creators who maybe aren't quite so handy with a camera. Something to thing about.
Rev
PS: I obviously don't know the actual gimmick involved here, so feel free to correct me on any of the above. I'm just going on what I can see in the performance video.