Price$34.95
Media TypeDVD
CategoryClose Up, Manipulation
Date AddedApr 30, 2011
Papercuts
Hestnes, Chris
Dan and Dave Buck
(Based on 1 review)
Our universal teaching method allows anyone with a basic knowledge of card handling to easily follow along as though they were receiving a private lesson from Chris.
Over 2 hours of bonus features including a 26-minute behind the scenes documentary, an interview with the crew about the art of flourishes, promotional trailers, hidden tutorials, bloopers, and more!
Reviews
(Top ▲)
For $35 bucks, you get over two hours of eye-candy, 13 visually stunning extreme flourishes, an incredibly produced DVD and a pretty big piece of ad copy that does NOT live up to its claim. The ad copy claims that anyone with basic knowledge of card handling can easily follow along. I beg to differ. I have pretty advanced (or worst case scenario intermediate - certainly beyong basic) knowledge level of card handling, and it was not easy. In fact some of the stuff was basically not learn-able because portion of the teaching that I felt were needed were just not there. As you'll see below, the method of teaching left so much material untaught.
The bottom line is this: If you want to spend $35 to watch a couple hours of incredible flourishes, in all likelihood, you'll be happy with your purchase. However, if you plan on learning these moves, I think you'll be quite a bit disappointed. The method of teaching is to have a camera above and behind Hestnes looking over his shoulder while he does the sequence of moves very slow. There is no talking, no discussing of finer points, no help on tricks or tips on mastering the moves, just Hestnes doing the moves slowly. That's it.
Again, the material is incredibly entertaining, but the teaching is just not there. There are, for example, a few moves/sequences where he seems to be using some pressure in a particular way to get the cards to fling into the air and flip over and land on his other hand. It's just not very clear how he's doing it. This would be a perfect place for some commentary explaining what's going on. In fairness, in the bonus section there are a few moves/flourishes taught with verbal explanations. But for the most part, there is a ton of information that is lost or missing due to the method of teaching.
Some flourishes might be learn-able via this method, but most of them on the DVD in my opinion are not. If you just want some killer entertaining flourishes to watch, as I said, you'll like this video. If you want to learn them, you probably will not.
So I'm left with a middle of the road decision.
Final Verdict: 2.5 Stars with a Stone Status of Grubble (sort of gem and sort of rubble).