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Mugshot

Schaller, Kevin

(Based on 1 review)
Mugshot offers six practical and commercial effects that were designed to be performed on the street or at a serious magic gig.
All Illusions are achieved without magnets, threads or complicated arts and crafts.

Easy to do - Easy to succeed.

DVD Contents:
Singularity - Visual change of a playing card, clipped to your baseball cap. Impossible and unique souvenir. Sham - Change any liquid inside of a cup. Change lemonade into a real lemon, water into ice or coffee into coffee powder. Firearm - Turn any baseball cap into an utility prop without causing any harm to it. Make cards shoot out of the cap or change cleanly. Mask of Sanity - A highly visual penetration of a straw into any bottle, no matter if it's plastic or glass. no holes or slits. Dark Horse - Visually link a rubber band onto your cap. Snapback - Rip and Restore a signed card, and be able to hand it out after.

Reviews

Dr. J. M. Ayala De Cedoz

Official Reviewer

Oct 22, 2014

Have you ever saw the trailer for a magic video and thought, "Hey, that looks pretty good!" and the moment you see the explanations you slap yourself, not because the methods are phenomenal/simple/ingenious but because you were disappointed?

You may well end up doing that with this DVD. I will say right up front that some of the things on this disc are quite clever, however, I would say 5 out of the 6 are imminently impractical for everyday use.

I have to mention that a part of the ad copy is an outright lie - the part about there being '...no holes or slits.' Absolutely not true. Also, the part of the description for 'Firearm' that claims cards change "cleanly" - that is debatable.

The video starts right up on the menu screen and there is the option of watching the DVD trailer (why?), the performances and the explanations. If you select the performance button, you go from performance to the explanation without asking, and at the end of the explanation, you go back to the menu of effects on the DVD.

One thing that bothered me was the lack of transition between performance and explanation (there are NO live performances). They just cut out mid-stream. What I mean by that is normally the shot fades away. Here that never happens it ju...

Kind of like that. Earlier I asked why they bothered putting a trailer on this DVD (or any DVD, really because after all, you already saw the trailer and that was presumably the reason you bought the DVD to begin with, right?) Well here, it is especially senseless because the trailer IS the "performance" videos. Nothing different at all.

The camera work is not studio quality but was still pretty good - not great, but good. There were a few times when the shot was a tad out of frame, but nothing that hindered the teaching, which was all done via text (no speech on this DVD) and visual learning. By the way - after you see the first explanation, turn your sound off because it is the same...music...for...the...whole...video...and it gets annoying after the second explanation.

The teaching portions of certain effects could have used some clarity or could have at least been more in-depth. Everything on here requires some arts and crafts to put together - some of them more than others. One of them in particular requires more work than the effects is worth, in my humble opinion.

To a person like myself who performs magic for a living, the stuff on this video does look very good but except for maybe one item, they are best suited for TV or camera work. I say this because if you were to perform some of these effects for laypeople, they WILL want to examine things and most of the stuff on here is not examinable without almost-too-extensive clean-up.

I will not bother to talk about any of the individual effects except to say that if I were ever to do any one of the 6 effects for a live audience, it would be the one called 'Sham', which is the one where you drink liquid from a cup, remove the lid and the liquid has vanished or changed into something else, like sugar or salt. Even then, I would make some major changes to the construction of the gimmick.

Once again I have to say that I do not dislike the methods or ideas presented here - they really do look good, however impractical they may be. Bottom line here is if you like what you see in the trailer and need something for a TV appearance or projection screen work, you might like some of these - especially for the $25/USD price tag which I think is very good. If you are looking for something to do on the street or in other venues for a live audience, there are lots of other DVDs with more practical effects on them.
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