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Anything that looks strange while attempting
to produce a magical effect will take away
from that magical effect.
Thus, the quality of your magic depends on
the Level of Believable Action you employ.
This means how much the audience trusts
your actions when doing things that are to
appear as normal.
Here is an example of how the
application of a believable action made a
good move fantastic. I had been working on
a move called Snap Back Vanish. In this
move a coin is held at the fingertips. The
move consists of snapping the coin back
into the hand very quickly. During the use of
the move one hand moves a coin to the
other hand. Then one hand closes while
the other snaps the coin back into the
hand holding the coin. The other hand
closes as if it received the coin. The
illusion is very good that the one hand that
closed received the coin. My goal in
working more with this move was to make
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it better. My method was to make the action
more believable.
I studied natural ways a coin was moved
from one hand to the other. One way was
to hold the coin high above the hand
receiving the coin during the transfer. The
receiving hand would be cupped ready to
receive the coin being dropped from
above. The hand holding the coin would
drop suddenly, release the coin and go
back up to its original position. I applied
this motion to the vanish. At the bottom of
the sudden drop, the coin would be snapped
back into the hand holding the coin. As the
forgoing suggests, that hand would rise
naturally as if it dropped the coin. The
resulting action looked quite good.
At the time I was playing with this
technique I was attending a magic
convention some place. I found myself
chatting with Mel Stover who was a very
experienced magician from Canada. During
our discussion I was playing with a coin.
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