I always love it when my interests overlap so imagine my joy at seeing Corridor Crew do a VFX examination of a Copperfield Illusion, to show how it was done.
Technically I should be opposed to this kind of exposure but when its a trick from 25 years ago, that was on a TV special, requiring a 2000 era las vegas budget, and will probably never be done again… it’s kind of a methodological cul-de-sac. On top of all that it is also a camera trick, so fuck him.
I don’t want to talk about the method though. I wan’t to talk about the effect.
Lets do it in the style of the movie The Prestige, which I love.
The Pledge
Arguably the longest part of the effect is the setup. We are sequentially introduced to the live feed of Hawaii on screen, the person David will be travelling with, a randomly selected audience member who signs David’s arm and is photographed as proof that whats on screen is not a recording but must happen after this intro. Then they step into the lifted veil.
The Turn
The veil is dropped and both David and his fellow traveller have vanished. A similar setup on the beach on screen in Hawaii. The passenger runs into the distance to prove that hes really there and then David shows his signed arm, and the polaroid. Worth noting that this was filmed before real-time augmented reality and seamless green screen background replacement so there was no simple alternative explanation for those watching. This is a solid way to show that somehow David had gone from the stage to a beach somewhere in around 5 seconds.
The Prestige
David comes back, arriving not in the veil but on a platform right at the back of the audience. He then runs to the stage to release a handful of sand from the beach.
There’s one bit of this whole process that I have a really weird bugbear about.
Why does he arrive in the middle of the audience just to walk back to the stage?
Anyone who has seen either the Prestige, or Mac King’s live show, or half of the illusion acts of the 20th century will know at least a partial answer to this. It is a very common big finish trick to have the performer bound up somehow, from which they vanish and then enter the auditorium from the rear, ideally in a timespan in which they shouldn’t have been able to travel that distance¹.
When you think about it, if a person disappeared on the spot inside a box and then reappeared in the same box, you’d be fairly justified in thinking that they never left the box, and it just had a hidden compartment or something. Reappearing elsewhere is just a way of showing you went somewhere else. That’s kind of why you have to reappear at all, to prove that you’re not just under the stage courtesy of a trapdoor while the ghost lights come up and everyone leaves.
Following the narrative of Copperfield’s trick however, he shouldn’t have to prove that he wasn’t just tucked into a secret compartment. The audience saw him on a screen thousands of miles away in Hawaii, where he proved that it was live because he had artifacts from that nights stage show on his person.
Arriving back 50 feet from the place he vanished should if anything suggest that he went wrong on his return journey, because he’s made a 5000 mile round trip only to miss the stage on his leap back.
The Alternative
Would the trick have been as strong if he had instead appeared from the same spot and in the same way as his departure?
I have an interesting hypothesis for this.
To us: yes, to the live theatre audience: no.
When we watch this video we are watching David Copperfield on a screen for the entire show. So if were watching him on a screen on a screen² it’s still essentially the same to us. Hes travelling in 2D space.
But live on the night you’re seeing a live David Copperfield disappear on the spot, followed by a video segement which looks live but who knows, and then he appears back where he started. The 3D david Copperfield made of flesh, blood, and silken blouses didnt really go anywhere. He just hid for 5 minutes as a film played.
Even when the VFX David Copperfield proves as best he can that he’s the real actual copperfield from the show that night, he’s still just made of pixels.
For it to be a teleportation effect the 3D David Copperfield has to move somewhere. Even if the length of the on screen interlude means he could have sauntered there at a steady pace³.
When I went to Vegas⁴ (I’ve been 3 times so I guess this should be every time I’ve been to Vegas) I saw so many magicians and I was even in the MGM grand to find out how much tickets were for Copperfield’s show. Even though I could afford them in the end I didn’t buy them.
Even though I watched so much David Copperfield on TV in the 90s and 00s, it just wasn’t that much of a draw. I think I knew that all along but I only realised after the big posters and publicity mollified me into the box office⁵. In the back of my head I’d still got this idea that because Copperfield did such massive stunts and had such a huge budget, 90% of what I saw was going to be achieved through high tech and heavy machinery.
The result of that is that technically I don’t know if what David Copperfield Is currently doing uses screens or not. Recently he was slated to make the moon disappear but no one seemed to get quite as excited about it as they did for the Statue of Liberty or the Lear Jet.
I do find it interesting that at the same time that David Copperfield was using a videoscreen effect on his TV special, David Blaine had recently beeb frozen in a block of ice for 72 hours, and just 2 years later going without sustenance suspended in a plexiglass box over the Thames for over a month, all in an attempt to make his work more real.
With modern technology David Copperfield wouldn’t even have to be as clever in the setup, he could just do a piece in The Volume and teleport to Titan while Iron Man flew in to kick Thanos in the nuts behind him, so I would imagine he can’t possibly still be using screens.
Don’t get me wrong, screens still have their place in magic, such as effects where objects appear and vanish by going in or out of 2D space as a kind of motivating factor⁶, but the irony is that the most common use of screens in shows now is big revelations in mentalism, where ironically the hard part is convincing the audience that the footage is actually genuinely pre-recorded rather than live.
Derren Brown achieves this through paying celebrities to do his big reveals because there’s no way they’re waiting backstage to do it live every night. Mark Spelman used video clips of his daughter as a baby predicting the outcome of his BGT act because she is obviously now too old to reprise the role.
I strongly suspect that as real time special effects become easier, more people like Tyler Sherwin and Piff The Magic Dragon will use them as a joke in the show and more serious⁷ illusionists will return to lower tech methods and good old fashioned showmanship.
I cannot wait.
¹ Different levels of peril are applied depending on the nature of the show. Some big illusion shows like to frame it as a failed escape where the crate the magician is in blows up because they didn’t make it out in time, or falls from a great height to break apart on the ground. Thus the big reveal is less a teleport and more of a resurrection. Mac King climbs into a cardboard box which falls over after doing a comedy bit with a blanket over his head.
² Or on a screen on a screen on a screen if you go by the vfx breakdown of Corridor Crew. Really it’s a very clever method. The kind of method which, to someone with the right flavour of autism, is more entertaining than a man teleporting to Hawaii and back.
³ Yes I know that many teleportation effects use time misdirection to give the main performer a chance to get into position, but for most routines that doesn’t involve the audience looking at an empty stage for 5 minutes.
⁴ Honestly, love to refer to Las Vegas as just Vegas, like it’s an alien planet where they built a theme park resembling Earth’s main landmarks and cultures, all in a sort of uncanny not quite right way. The sort of place where you would be constantly observed by thousands of cameras to study human behavior in an environment designed to numb the senses to it’s corrupting influence through overindulgence in all the worst vices… Which honestly is exactly how it feels the entire time you’re there. I don’t know why all the world’s greatest magicians gravitate there. My only assumption is that the whole place seems so fake that it makes the magic feel more genuine.
⁵ Instead, every time I have been to the MGM grand I look for the clipboard people who want test audiences for their shows. I love filling out surveys and seeing rough early versions of things. I was surveyed by market researchers before Maoam came to the UK. Got to eat a fucktonne of candy and then tell them it was meh.
⁶ Though this is hardly a heavy hitting illusion in and of itself, I went to Taskmaster Live and in the first room a video projection of Alex Horne threw our guide a rubber ball and it didn’t even reigster as a magic trick for the 14 other people in the room.