How to do magic A magician's most elementary job description is to take the impossible making it possible. So if you would like to learn how to do magic, you have to first know precisely what exactly is impossible. Or rather, what ordinary people think doesn't seem possible.
In most of magic, you will find only seven basic effects. Of course there are many than seven tricks out there, but every one of them is just a variation of the seven basic effects. These are:
Appearance: What the law states of conservation of matter says that you can’t make something from nothing. However, a magician says, “BOOM…flowers.”
Vanish: This is exactly the opposite of an appearance. A vanish is when you're taking something and change it into nothing. This should actually be impossible, but magicians do all of it the time. In reality, it’s our most requested trick. People always ask me to make their mother-in-law disappear, but I don’t do that sort of thing. Instead, I send these to my Fat Uncle Tony. He’s a “magician” who specializes in making people “disappear”.
Transportation: Science lets us know that nothing within the universe can go faster than the speed of light. Magicians just roll their eyes and shake their heads. A transportation effect is a combination of both a vanish as well as an appearance. This is where you make something disappear from one place and INSTANTLY reappear in another place. Take that, science.
Transformation: An alchemist’s dream is usually to turn lead into gold, but alas. Science says it’s a no-no. Fortunately, magicians say it’s a yes-yes. Perhaps this could be considered another mix of a vanish plus an appearance - one object disappears plus a different object instantly appears in its place. As an example, some magicians turn a red scarf in to a blue scarf. I don’t make use of that crap; I just turn everything into beer and rigatoni.
Levitation: Gravity is relentless. However, magicians are relentless-er. We’ve found ways to give the illusion that the object is floating without any visible method of support. Defying gravity is wicked. Under this category fall variations like “suspension” (making an object do a hopeless joggling act) and “animation” (making an inanimate object move on it's own). In order to learn
how to do magic, then you’ve got to make stuff float. (Please, no jokes about how precisely you possibly can make a root beer float.)
Penetration: This is simply described as solid passing through solid. Normally, in the atomic level, the force of electromagnetism makes this impossible. Of course, magicians know ways for this. The most famous penetration I will consider is when David Copperfield walked with the Great Wall of China. Oh, might time I put one fourth through a glass table.
Restoration: The last effect is when a physical object is destroyed and then put back together. Magicians are notorious for smashing someone’s watch after which magically repairing it (usually). David Blaine continues to be recognized to restore a defunct fly back to normal. Me? I haven’t quite got this one down yet. I recently break stuff. Y’know…rules, molds, banks, ladies’ hearts…
To find out a good example of every one of these seven magic effects doing his thing, check out this YouTube video called “
How To Do Magic"