Good Tricks for a Promotional Video

[Arconik]

Hello theory 11,

I am 16 years old and trying to create a promotional video for Facebook, to hopefully be booked for things like barbeques or anything that gets me out the house. However, my initial thought was to do with the following presentation:

Hello I am (patter)...
I can do anything from silly tricks (produce salt from my hand with a thumb tip; although my thumb tip is far too small for my thumb cause I got it from a kids set I think).
To more advanced card stuff (I was going to do Revolve by Nicolas Lawrence but I couldn't find it so maybe some sort of colour change).

Although I quickly realised this doesn't really lead onto something so I've turned to this forum for some advice.

(Imma just run through all my thoughts as I have no idea how to structure this)

My main thought was that at the end, I would overlay some reactions, or at least the audio to some reactions. The only negative is that I never film my tricks (feels a bit weird just carrying a tripod around with you and high chance that it might get stolen) and therefore the only good reactions are from 12 year old kids who decided to film it on there phone so then after I asked if they could send it to me in case I ever wanted to use it. This followed on to me thinking about going out and getting reactions, which will include the hassle of setting up my phone etc but may be the best option so people realise that my tricks cater more to the older demographic (and i'm performing anyway so I can spread word that way). However, I quickly realised that if I do my full routine I could just post that as my promotional video as long as it has good reactions, however I'm not to sure as 1. I don't want to show tricks I plan to use at these barbeque events. 2. One performance doesn't say much about me as a person. 3. They may believed it to be staged etc.

Other thoughts I had was alike to the start showing my variety, and then take some reactions off the internet and edit them in. Although this is now getting a bit im-moral as I am sort of lying ish.

Has anyone got any other ideas or advice? Any nice short tricks that might work to show a variety of talent?

P.S: I do want to say that I specialize in card magic so they don't get too disappointed if the majority of the things they see are card related...

(There was probably other ideas I've had but I can't think of them now, I may edit this post or add another comment when I think of them)

 

[WitchDocIsIn]

A promo reel's purpose is to let a potential client know what you can do for them, and get them excited about the idea of hiring you to do that.

A couple things to keep in mind -

When you get hired to do a party, the person hiring you probably isn't actually going to be super concerned with what you do. What they will worry about is whether their guests enjoyed themselves. So that's what they need to see happening - people enjoying themselves.

You'll pretty much never need to show a full routine, and in fact you should probably avoid doing that. Again, the client is going to be more concerned with the results of your entertainment, not the process.

If you have any good testimonials it's good to include a few of those. As well as any media appearances you may have done such as news spots or other TV appearances.

There's a couple ways to sort of 'cheat' to get decent footage. The first and most obvious is to bring someone along on your gig (with the client's knowledge and permission obviously) to record your performances. You can offer a slightly lower fee, but usually if you just put it in the contract that you'll have someone assisting you to record the performances for promotional purposes it's fine. Another thing you can do is throw a party yourself and have someone film performances as if you'd been hired. And obviously if someone you know throws a party, you can ask if they'd mind if you entertained the guests in exchange for being able to record some footage for promotional purposes.

So, ultimately, you don't need to think about which tricks you'll be doing in the video. All you need to do is make sure you've got a good representation of what you are offering the client in the sense of how their guests will react to your performances.

Here's some examples of promos that professionals use: