(electronic music)
- Yo, what it is?
Chris Ramsey here.
Welcome back to my channel.
Today we're gonna look at something
super, super visual and interesting,
how to make a card vanish and appear at your fingertips.
It is extremely visual, so much fun to do.
I use this all the time.
A lot of magicians do.
It's not a big secret out there,
but there are a few techniques and touches and little things
that might help your progress on this move
and help you guys get to the point
where it looks like real camera magic.
Now, there are a lot of tutorials out there on
YouTube currently that teach this technique.
There are books and books and books.
The first that I've heard of this,
I read a book by Howard Thurston,
which was a super old book,
and it had, you know, the back palm technique within it,
and that's where I'd first learned it.
But you can find this in so many different books,
pretty much public domain at this point.
I even use it as a gag as a part of my show.
I'll be like, "Oh, what if I made
this card disappear right now?
Would that be amazing?
Here we go, one, two, three, gone."
we'll never see it again, it's gone forever,
and I kind of use that as a joke.
It's a hilarious thing, and people appreciate
seeing the sleight of hand a little bit.
It gives them like a little bit more respect for your craft.
I'm not divulging too much in performance,
but when I do something like that,
they look it and they're like,
"Oh wow, he's actually really good, and funny."
But it's a cool little thing.
I mean, if you want to show your nephew a trick
or if you want to just impress your friends quickly,
it's a quick little visual thing,
and most people will be like,
"Well, you're hiding it behind your hand,"
and you can say, "Yeah."
It's not the end of the world.
That being said, there are a few little techniques
and there are a few little hints and routines
that you can do with this to make it look super visual
on camera or in real life,
and we're gonna get into those right now,
Thanks for watching.
All right, so first thing's first,
in that little demo that I did at the beginning,
those were the Black Tigers by Ellusionist.
These are an iconic deck.
You know what?
These go in and out of style.
Like, at first, this was like the hottest thing ever,
and let me tell you, these are pretty much still
the hottest thing ever when it comes to retail stores
like around the world.
This is like the number one deck that everyone sells.
It's got a cool contrast, so I kind of like these.
But, for this tutorial, we won't be using the Black Tigers.
We will be using the Aurelians.
These are designed by Geraint Clark and by Oban Jones.
I won't get into a deck review right now,
but if you want a deck review of these in the near future,
head on over to Ellusionist's YouTube page.
I'll leave the link below.
Also, if you want to cop these and or the Black Tigers,
the link is below.
Let's get into the tutorial.
Your grip is gonna be like so, yeah.
That's pretty much what you're gonna start off with,
'cause that's how you're gonna be able to hide the card.
It's these two fingers doing all the motion.
As you're here, if you can imagine,
little horns, this is almost like a little bull,
holding that card between my thumb
and my index and ring finger, just like so.
You see how it's like that?
Obviously I'm not gonna just vanish it like this.
This is all done within a motion,
so as I'm shaking my hand,
they think I'm holding it like this
'cause I can show them my hand.
As I turn around, the fingers curl,
so it kind of looks like this.
It kind of looks like I'm still holding it normally,
but in fact, I've got the devil horns here.
As I'm here and I shake, that's when it disappears.
So, once you're pinched here between
the thumb, middle, and ring finger, your pinky and index,
now, this is gonna take some practice,
and just to give you an idea,
I'll do it on my left hand.
Yeah.
But you'll get the hang of it.
If I can do it with my left hand,
I'm pretty sure you guys can do it with
your dominant hand eventually.
If you have any rings, take 'em off.
That'll probably help.
So as you're here, you make those devil horns,
and the card contacts those part of the pinky and index.
You see how it's contacting those two?
So, as I'm here, boom, those two grab onto that.
Now, again, it's gonna take some dexterity.
That's gonna take some time before you actually
are able to grab it like that.
You want to hold onto the card like that
and all your middle finger and ring finger
are going to be doing is opening up.
See how it sort of pivots?
Those two fingers, so literally,
that's all that's holding the card is those two fingers.
Now, again, if you're up too high,
you're gonna get this.
You're gonna get those sort of
little leaks through the windows.
So you want to grab it, like, lower.
You can kind of, by squeezing your fingers together,
really hide it, right?
Now, you don't want to do it up here obviously
'cause then it will be like that.
You kind of want to get that right,
as low as possible on the hand, right,
so that you don't see it.
I can go about this low before it starts to
get weird and awkward for me.
I hold it right around there.
Boom, it's disappeared.
With practice, you'll be able to stretch your hand out.
You'll be able to maneuver a little bit more,
but for now, just practice this here.
Just practice this little motion.
Just that, and then bring it back.
You do the opposite and you grab it, right?
From the back.
Roll it up there,
and then curl back to grab it.
Now, a lot of the stage manipulation stuff,
they'll go from here to here to here.
I mean, I think it's just kind of weird to be like,
"Hey, look at the back of my hand.
Oh, wait, look at the front of my hand.
Oh, wait, there's a card."
It's kind of weird and unnecessary.
It is impressive, but it's not something that I would do.
So instead, what I like to do is a fun little routine
where I toss the card, and then the card comes back,
and I do this by using another deck,
or the same deck rather, but just the rest of it.
Now, bear with me here for the depth of field,
but you'll get the idea.
So if I'm here, I wanna tilt my left wrist downward,
so I don't, I'm not hiding this deck.
They know I have it,
but I just don't want it to be in view right now,
because when I go to throw this,
so I'm gonna throw that,
my thumb is gonna pull off.
See how that kind of appears?
It's kind of cool.
Little easy production.
All my thumb is doing is I'm pushing it off to the side
and then that corner, it's kind of riding off that corner.
And it just kind of pops up out of nowhere.
Boom.
So what you wanna do is with this hand,
as I come down, I'm throwing it,
again, I'm throwing it towards here,
so even at half speed, that still looks magical.
Right?
So I'm throwing it, boom, towards,
and then boom, catching it back here.
So again, for the production,
all you want to do is curl it and pinch it.
Curl it and pinch it.
You can have a lot of fun with that sort of
playing around with different ways of having it pop,
maybe from the bottom, boom.
It just looks really magical.
Now, to get into the production a little more,
this is obviously the production that most people use,
is just kind of like the grabbing it, which looks cool.
To add to that, if you pull back,
it looks even better.
It looks like you're just, like,
grabbing it out of thin air,
versus just popping it up there in your hand.
So, kind of like the bigger motion once again
covers the smaller motion, pull back,
like where did, what the fuck?
And here's a production that I like to use.
This is a production at the fingertips.
It looks very elegant.
It takes a lot more practice,
but it does look really good.
So once the card is gone, it appears at
the fingertips just like that with barely any motion,
and my hands are stretched the whole time,
and just a card appears there.
It just looks super elegant, like,
how did he pluck that out of the sky?
It looks like I'm just grabbing it out of thin air.
And to do that, it's a little bit more tricky,
but as you're curling in,
so as these hands are curling in again
to produce the card like we just looked at,
I'm going to apply pressure with my pinky
and that's gonna make the card sort of bounce up
and I'm gonna pinch it between these two fingers.
So, as I'm here,
the pinky kind of is what's sort of
slingshotting it back up, right?
So as you go to produce it,
your middle finger and index get ready to pinch it
and your pinky lets go,
and the card is produced straight up, which is cool.
Just kind of like,
not like that, like this.
Boom.
If you can get it right to barely any motion,
that's where you want to be.
You don't want to be, you don't want to be here
and going, right, 'cause that kind of looks weird.
So you want to just kind of like,
oh look, my hands are empty, nice little subtlety.
I can rub my fingers together.
Boom, the card appears.
All right guys, that about wraps it up for
the back palm producing and vanishing card tutorial.
I hope you enjoyed that and I hope it was informative.
For those of you intermediate magicians
who already know this move,
maybe you learned something new.
Maybe there something you didn't know before
that you can apply,
and for the more experienced and advanced magicians,
maybe there's something you can add to that
in the comments below.
If there's anything that I skipped over
or that I overlooked, I would love to hear your feedback.
And for the new magicians, welcome to the channel.
I'm glad you guys are here.
I hope you guys stay,
and I hope you check out all the other videos.
This channel is not only about tutorials
and you guys know that already.
I'm not the guy that just tutorial after tutorial.
It's not what I want, first of all, for the magic community,
and second of all for my channel.
You know, a lot of people, that's all they do is tutorials
'cause they know that's what people want
and they know that that's what keeps them coming in,
but honestly, I think there's so much more to magic
than just learning techniques.
There's theory behind it, there's a lifestyle behind it,
there's an industry, there's comedy.
I mean, there's so many things
that magic encompasses more than just methods,
and that's one of the big things about this channel
is that method isn't the focus.
Effect is the focus.
What is the effect, what am I trying to do.
What am I trying to invoke within you,
within the spectator, within other magicians.
That's the effect.
Methods are out there.
You can find methods.
You can just go and look for them and you'll find them.
The effect is where it's at.
So really take this, go with it, run with it,
have fun with it, just rhyme with it, on a dime with it.
But honestly, I appreciate you guys tuning into this channel
and I really, really like that I'm able to have
this conversation with a lot of you.
And by the way, so many of you translated a whole bunch of
videos, like Arabic, Greek, Dutch, Hungarian,
Croatian, French, German, Italian.
I mean, I'm just going out of my mind.
If you guys want to keep that up,
let me know in the comments if you did
and I'll verify that that's you,
and then I'll give you like a little shout out
in the comments or something if you help translate this,
because I think it's super cool of
this community to help out like that,
and you guys are super awesome for doing that, so thank you.
So, there it is.
Learn it, learn it well.
I hope you had fun and I hope that you really take the time
to practice this before you throw it up
on Instagram and YouTube and all that stuff.
Really get it down.
It took me probably like two, three solid months
when I started learning this before I was comfortable enough
to put it on camera, and even then,
years later I'm looking at it now,
and I'm like, "Damn, I got so much better."
So, take the time to learn it properly.
It'll look just that much better on camera
and you won't have to delete frames.
I see you.
Thanks again, guys.
Thanks to also Ellusionist for providing
the playing cards in this video.
If you guys want to check out those playing cards
and or other tutorials if you want to learn some more magic,
head on over to Ellusionist's YouTube page.
I'll leave the link below.
Thanks again, guys.
Give this a like if you like it.
It always helps the channel, and we'll see you next time.
Peace.