Sand Art

Way back when, at a time when the BBC still had the good taste to include magic shows as part of their output, Paul Daniels would include unusual acts as part of his show; one of those acts was sand art.

Fortunately these days, the internet provides access to examples of sand art.  Ilana Yahav is a world renowned sand artist appearing on television from Europe to the Far East. Of course due to British television companies' perverse stand, in complete contradiction to the rest of the world, to avoid broadcasting any act that might come under the label of variety we're unlikely to see her on British television. (Years ago, the then person in charge of the BBC who said that 'variety is dead' further demonstrated the 'accuracy' of his knowledge of public opinion by also saying that Doctor Who was unpopular and cancelled the show, apparently with the view that it would never be aired on our screens again. Hmm.)

Anyway, below is a video of Ilana's work entitled One Man's Dream. Ilana Yahav's website can be found at http://www.sandfantasy.com/

In Flanders Fields

Film of J. N. Maskelyne Performing Plate Spinning

If you know anything about the history of magic in the UK then you will have heard of J. N. Maskelyne. Amongst all the wonders that he performed in magic shows, he performed plate spinning. No, not the spinning a plate on a stick sort of thing. This is something else altogether.

In the book The Modern Conjurer by C. Lang Neil (1903 edition), two of the pages have film like strips printed down the edges. The blurb explains that they pictures taken using the technology of the cinematograph. I decided to see if I could make a video from the images of Maskelyne in action. I scanned the pages, edited the individual pictures into separate files and edited a very brief film using them. I have no idea what became of the original film. The book states the pictures were taken especially for the book, so it was probably never publicly used.

Well, here is the video.

Portrait of Dai Vernon

Chris Cross

Amongst all the digital hither and thither of social network sites on the internet, magician Chris Cross and I have exchanged the occasional message. This week I experienced the 'instant messaging' of Facebook when Chris contacted me about my portraits of magicians. He was interested in one of himself as a bonus feature for a DVD. A gentlemen's agreement was arrived at and here is the result. It is not in the same style as the other videos because it is not part of the same project.

For those techies who want to know the how of it, I simply used a scanner to produce digital images as I progressed through the drawing. These were then edited together to create the video. The process is an annoying one because I have to continually interrupt the drawing process; my level of concentration involves starting and not stopping until the picture is finished. Another setback is alignment of images. I was lucky in this video in that it was not too bad. One setback, despite the high resolution of the scanner, was the fading of colour. I marked out Chris' hair as brown and his tie as yellow. His hair appears red in the video and the tie is barely visible until redone near the end of the video.

I do not know the details of when the video will be available on Chris' DVD so keep an eye on his website http://www.chris-cross.co.uk/ for its availability. Also, Chris is on tour in the UK this summer so check his site for details.