This morning, while getting ready for school, my son asked me an interesting question:
Do you do any other kind of magic, or just card magic?
The question was unprompted and kind of out of the blue, but I had an answer already ready. "Mostly cards. I know some other things, but cards are what I love." Really not knowing where he was trying to go with this train of thought, he surprised me with his response:
You should really do other kinds of magic too. People will get bored really fast if you only do card tricks.
He knows very well my level of involvement with card magic. He's practically buried under stacks of decks and books, and he's my go-to spectator whenever I learn or come up with a new trick. But, is he bored? Or was he offering actual constructive advice?!
I'm accepting his response as sincere advice, whether it was meant as that or not. I'm also going to leverage it to have him be my assistant and come up with some cool routines that I wouldn't be able to pull off on my own. That, and maybe recruit him as a cameraman for some multi-angle shots on the new Instagram videos!
Overall, the question has sat with me all day. Does focusing on a single type of magic run a greater risk of boring the audience, or would it depend on the set of routines themselves. I tend to add a lot of variety and develop sets that are cohesive and flow together. A story unfolds in the span of 15 to 20 minutes. Some work, some don't work as well. Perhaps the issue is that it's the same audience that witnesses card magic routinely and they simply become numb to it? Or a combination of both?
What do you think?
Speaking of video, I've been contemplating starting a YouTube channel too. No crazy plans or anything that would take away from here, but maybe something like a podcast with an occasional tutorial. It would also give me a way to record specific routines that I mention here for a better visual reference.
I'm still on the fence about it though. The YouTube landscape is different than anything I've done before, even though it's video and I've been uploading videos to Instagram for years now. However, I do think that it would give a much better "magic" experience than what I'm limited to on Instagram. I'll have to talk to some of my friends that run channels to see what their take on it is.
Watch, this time next year I'll have a channel up and I'll be stuck doing weekly deck reviews...
Oh yeah, speaking of tutorials, back in June I introduced Tutorial Tuesday on Instagram (@gbabbits). I wanted to do it as a trial run, just basic card flourishes. It worked really well!
A simple ribbon spread turnover tutorial became my most popular post ever:
My phone blew up for a whole day, it was really spectacular! And then, I stopped posting tutorials.
I stopped because of mental fatigue and nothing else; I'll start it again next week because I received a lot of good feedback on those videos. Again though, they're nothing more than simple card flourishes but people seem to like them!
If I do a YouTube channel though, I'd put actual card magic tutorials there. I'll be writing a few here too and hey, maybe I'll put out a book one of these days =]