How I Got to Invent Magic For David Blaine
Designing street magic and working on David's TV Special.
The first time I met David Blaine was during Magic Live, an annual convention luring thousands of magicians to Las Vegas. A friend of mine took me to one of the massive penthouses at the MGM Grand, where David and his entourage of consultants and personal assistants were conducting interviews. They needed one more person to round out the consulting team and came to Vegas during the convention to find them.
As magicians, we all have reputations for something or another. In my case, I was introduced to David as someone who knows everything. That, of course, is not true, but I enjoy reading magic books (over a thousand to be exact) and have a great memory for unusual information. So, when my friend told David that I was the magic nerd they were looking for, he punctuated it with “Ask him anything.”
David took this opportunity to craft a pretty diabolical question — “What role does alum play in making egg skins?”
Full disclosure, you don’t need to know what any of this means, but I will give you my answer(s). Much like the last courtroom scene in My Cousin Vinny, what David actually asked me was a trick question that was about two separate things involving eggs. First, alum is not used for making egg skins. It does, however, play a neat role in a different egg trick. Here is what I told him:
“Alum isn’t used for egg skins, but it is used when you want to write on an egg yolk without affecting the shell. Making egg skins, though, uses duck eggs that are blown out and soaked in an acid like white vinegar or hydrochloric acid to dissolve the calcium shell, leaving just the rubbery membrane. You then need to flush it with alcohol and treat it with glycerin and talcum powder.”
There it was, my magic nerd was on full display, and it seemed to do the trick. David’s second question was, “When can you move to New York?” Thankfully, I was fired/quit my job in Toronto just a few days before, so the answer was, immediately.
What really happened was a series of extraordinary events and coincidences all coliding at the perfect time. I was only able to make it to Magic Live because of a confrontation with my boss. Up until then, I was grinding away at a 9-5 IT job, and my soul was nearing its limit. Every year, I’d escape to Las Vegas for Magic Live for the weekend, carefully planning the trip so I would fly out Thursday evening, work from my hotel room Friday, and be back in the office by Monday morning. The plan always went without a hitch, but that year I received a stern phone call from a new superior who heard that I’d be out for a day. I explained the trip and the full remote working hours, but he wasn’t impressed. “If you don’t come in Thursday, don’t bother coming in on Monday.” I hung up the phone and proceeded packing. With that, I had quit my job in IT for good.
A little less enthusiastic about my life choices but ready to escape, I got packed and ran to the airport. The very next day, I met David Blaine and went from an unemployed techie to a professional magic consultant and moved to New York shortly after.
For the next five months, I lived and worked in a magic lab with four other consultants. Our day-to-day, morning-to-night, was inventing new magic for David’s TV specials and live show. Back home in Toronto, I have a metal shop and a wood shop where I make most of the magic props used in my work, and I got to put all those skills to good use. Because of confidentiality, I am unable to go into details of the specific tricks and mechanisms that were made at the time, but if you watch David’s last TV special on ABC, you will encounter a few of those ideas and inventions.
For the next time, I will talk more about what inventing magic actually entails and the process we went through from brainstorming to miracles.
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So enjoyed this Shane. Anxious to see where you go with all of it. Have you had a chance to see Derren Brown?
Love it