This is amazing

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Penny sent me this earlier and not being very good at magic, I haven;t a clue how it's done.

Check it out, but you have to watch it to the end for the really unbelievable bit...

Find it here

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Chinese Coin Magician

Hope Eternal Reigns's picture

Hi Nick,

Thanks for posting that. My nephew is a pretidigitator. I sent him the URL for that youtube. I'll let you know what he has to say about it. My only regret is that I couldn't understand what they were saying, though some of it was quite evident by context.

with love,

Hope

with love,

Hope

Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.

It's quite simple, really...

If you know how...

Enough silliness. One explanation is "Magic"... A different one would be the "magician" is actually capable of moving objects through other objects. (There's certainly room - despite how solid things and even we appear, if you get down to the atomic level, we're mostly space.) You don't like that one either? Awww. And I so hoped you would.

How about it's all CGI. Don't like that one either? This one shows ONE way that stage magicians are able to move coins THROUGH a solid glass table. (The ring is not required, but it does make things easier!)

Anne

Props and Stooges

Puddintane's picture

Everyone involved in this trick is trying to fool you, including the person running the camera, so there's not one magician, but rather nine, one of whom controls exactly what we're permitted to see. The table is a prop with a real hole in it which can be rotated (probably by the gang of five behind the "scene.") and everyone pretends A) Not to notice, and B) To be amazed.

Think about it. If the guy's doing amazing tricks and they're innocent spectators and witnesses, why don't the stooges move around the table so they can actually see what's going on?

Wouldn't you?

Most of the trick is ordinary slight of hand, which is made obvious by the artificial poses of his hands, which are meant to conceal his real movements, and only secondarily to manipulate the coins.

All the rest of the stage dressing is to convince us that we are part of an audience, when in fact we're looking through a square peephole into an elaborate con game.

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Elementary...

Puddintane's picture

You just have to believe your brain. Eyes are imperfect things. They don't see anything at all if movements are too fast or too unexpected. When he puts his arm through the table, there must be a hole, and he carefully shrouds the entry with a napkin, so there's a hole there that he doesn't want us to see which wasn't there before. Taking these together, the hole must have moved and the table is strangely circular, as in a bar, but we're on a stage, so it must rotate.

He does a lot of showy business with napkins way off to one side of the display stand, so something is happening over on the other side. The advantage of Youtube is that one can watch again and stop the action at will.

I agree about the magnets, as it seems the simplest way to perform some of the tricks, but some can be done with ordinary magicians wax or double-sided sticky tape.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
-- Sherlock Holmes

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Explanation

Puddin's explanation is pretty much identical to this video (unfortunately also in Chinese - but with some helpful graphics).

Now of course, that covers the final 'hand through glass' trick, and it's fairly obvious to most watching. The trick about 3 minutes in where a coin allegedly passes through the glass without any obscurations is explained in this clip which merely slows down the footage - he's concealing another coin in the hand below the table. If you're very careful and freeze frame around 3:16 you'll see the extra coin. There's still a bit of debate over where the third coin above the table goes - one possibility is that the coins above the table are rigged so two somehow precisely align.

Still, the trick looks quite impressive, and because the table's glass, it's possible even a camera placed below the table looking up might not catch the secret.

 


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As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

I believe, based on the clip...

Puddintane's picture

>> this clip which merely slows down the footage - he's concealing another coin in the hand below the table. If you're very careful and freeze frame around 3:16 you'll see the extra coin. There's still a bit of debate over where the third coin above the table goes -

...that two of one pair of coins are rigged to hinge together to form one apparent coin when he smacks the setup from below. Many magical tricks involve displacing the apparent timing of events in time, as well as elaborate imitations of what seem like ordinary items. If you stop and run the frames where he arranges the "three" coins on the surface of the table, you can see that the two on the right move very rigidly, which ought to be impossible from the way he's holding them.

coins.png

I think they're some variation of what magicians appear to call "flipper coins," as best as I can figure out from their coy descriptions.

Flipper Coin "Gaff" from Todd Lassen

Oooh! Here's an excellent demonstration of a flipper coin on Youtube: In Action

Boring theory

Coin through card I suspect the second coin is stuck to the bottom of the card with magician's wax, so it's knocked off when the gimmicked flipper coin is tossed on top, essentially half of the tabletop illusion.

Ordinarily, one's eyes can't register events that happen very quickly, which is why "motion pictures" -- which are in fact a series of still pictures -- look "real" to us. You can see from the slow motion that the flash of the concealed coin in his hand takes only a couple of frames, too quick to see.

After going back to look again at the clip, I also see that he probably arranged the hole partly on his own, because he slides his hand across the table in exactly the way he would have had to if he were adjusting the position of the hole. By that time, the camera has dropped down so we can no longer see the top of the table, so obviously the camera operator isn't as surprised by what happens as we are supposed to be. I still think it was pre-loaded by the stooges, though, because he doesn't *seem* to move his hand enough to rotate the table top from under the pad and cups so carefully arranged in front of an "empty" place at the table.

I also seemed to see what the explanation video pointed out, that the transparency of the glass is different in the part over his legs and the part on the other side of the "support" between his workspace and the rest of the table.

Funny, though, I remembered him using the napkin to conceal his hand, but my memory was flawed, probably because of all the other flourishes he made with it.

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Dashed Clever

joannebarbarella's picture

These Chinese...and insclutable too,

Joanne