Look! Up in the news feed!
It's a bird!
It's a dictator!
No! It's...
A bird saluting a dictator through a simple visual effect I explained ten years ago in my first video!
And one thing you need to know about me is that I never repeat myself.
Today's topic is magic.
The f-five categories of magic are:
Closeup, Stage, Animalerotic, VFX-assisted Video Performance, and Dave.
[DAVE INTENSIFIES]
[clears throat]
In May 2017, the mouths of America's Got Talent judges were more agape than usual,
during the audition of a young man performing a fresh take on the classic Coin Matrix Effect.
It started out traditionally, but ended with an astonishing series of instant transpositions and transformations.
How it was done, I... probably shouldn't get into
because when you deconstruct magic tricks, old people on Facebook compare you to The Masked Magician,
while remaining your fan, and rightfully so!
It's a well-believed fact that an illusion can't be entertaining if the audience knows the secret. Look!
These spirals aren't really moving!
See, ruined forever!
How would you like it if filmmakers shared how movies are made?
Or, if animators revealed the technical details of their "mystical craft?"
Why, the content they produce would instantly lose all commercial value!
When Penn & Teller unleashed their infamous transparent cups and balls routine,
it nearly destroyed the entire magic industry!
And their career is still in shambles.
So I'm not explaining the trick.
I won't call attention to the fact that the table's really thick, a conspicuous thing covers his right foot,
and the coins vanish and reappear in the exact same spots every time,
I simply won't!
But I will give you one clue.
Take a look up here, at the guy attached to the hands. Who is that, anyway?
His name is Will Tsai, and you can find videos of him demonstrating all kinds of magic tricks as impressive as his audition.
One even made a splash on Reddit, with lots of users confidently offering wrong explanations of the method.
Will's videos are perplexing and fun, like Magic Vines,
I mean, Instagrams,
except instead of cheap digital effects, they feature real-world, impossible to explain sleight of hand.
And just as magic Instagrams are ultimately designed to advertise the Subaru Outback,
Will's videos are designed to promote something, too.
You see, as you go on living your safe little life,
an unseen network of magic vendors churns beneath...
On websites familiar only to the socially... different, secrets are for sale.
Instructions for learning routines and building gimmicks that endow you with powers to manipulate the very fabric of reality
are on sale this month.
Oh, cool! I've been looking for that one!
These collectives make a business out of selling magic trick secrets to consumers,
and fight to protect them from each other.
Will Tsai designs particularly elegant products as a resident artist at SansMinds,
a company which, a while ago, got into a confrontation with another vendor, World Magic Shop,
over the ownership of a particular illusion.
This was a bitter feud, with angry emails, threats of legal action, and public statements.
The word "ethical" came up a lot.
I haven't witnessed tension like that since the recent Nova vs. Community Channel YouTube faceoff of 2007!
But it got me wondering.
Hypothetically, would it be "ethical" to promote one's work as a designer of commercial magic products
with videos that use visual effects?
Because, did I forget to mention? Will Tsai's magic trick videos use visual effects.
In fact, other than demonstrating his products, I can't seem to find a single clip of him performing magic
that isn't at some point augmented with editing, even in this supposedly live Hong Kong special.
And since, unlike magic tricks' secrets, visual effects belong to the people,
I have no problem explaining them.
All the tricks on Will's YouTube Channel involve manipulating objects normally in real time,
then adding or removing elements in post to create the actual trick.
These videos all use rig removal techniques to erase:
A dropping coin, and a hand placing it back,
a card falling into the lap,
a bill reemerging under the Sharpie,
and a coin continuously spinning on the table.
It's done very cleanly, with reconstructed pieces of the background and clothing showing only the tiniest evidence of manipulation.
A subtle shape-shift in the vest, the reflections in the metal shirt beads freezing briefly,
and the real shadows of the hands blending in and out of shadows captured separately
in a take where the hands didn't obstruct the table, and the coin wasn't on it.
In these videos, more blatant visual effects are used,
whether animating a still frame of a finger while masking away the real one to make it appear detached,
tracking an image of a 9-volt battery on top of a pair of double As until the moment they're flicked apart,
or just shifting the hue of a solid color ukulele through simple secondary color correction,
each trick looks compelling thanks to stellar compositing work, and not Will Tsai's skills as a magician.
He's not a magician.
He's a... "Visualist?"
But the question remains: if his tricks require visual effects to work,
then how did he successfully pull off a live stage performance for a panel of judges on TV?
Well, who says he did?
If we saw magical stuff happen on a table this unapologetically black in real life, we'd easily perceive it for what it is:
A black light theater effect, where people or devices covered in dark velvet material appear invisible against an equally dark background.
All sorts of mechanisms could hide and reveal the coins, even swap them for synthetic rose petals seamlessly,
as long as the right lighting forced our eyes to stay adjusted for the illusion.
But a taped performance gives us the luxury of peering into the shadows.
If we brighten the image, we can bring out lots of detail in Will's shirt, his hair, even the side of the table,
but the same doesn't happen with the table top.
Hmm... no matter how much we boost it, the surface stays pitch-black, other than a few compression artifacts.
And what's going on here?
When the fourth coin appears, for one frame it doesn't move along with the shaking table,
and the reflection of the hand in it is also frozen.
Here, just before the last coin is turned into a rose petal, it also floats in place, ignoring the motion of the table.
Wait a minute.
Are we really saying that the producers of this competition, which celebrates the art of live performance,
modify what happens on stage with editing tricks to make contestants seem better or worse than they did in real life,
to suit the dramatic needs of the program?
Well... yeah.
It's a reality show. It's all fake. They can do whatever they want.
They once made a sideshow magic act look like a world-class, impossible illusion by simply editing out a major give-away part of it,
so they certainly don't have a problem freezing some coins onscreen for an extra frame to disguise the mechanism
that hides and reveals them if it's just not quick enough for 30-frames-per-second scrutiny.
And I guess we have a choice to make.
We can reserve the term "magic" for genuine, live, physical illusions
that require clever design and a lifetime of practice to master,
or we can use it as a label for anything tricky or flashy achieved by any means.
In which case, I'd like to show you the greatest, most visually stunning, most inexplicable magic trick of all time.
[audience ooohing and applauding]