Day Two’s third and last session of The Essential Magic Conference was hosted by Stan Allan.

Marco Tempest was the first speaker of this session, and was talking about online magic.

He talked about his initial YouTube Videos, and how the videos he filmed with his mobile phone started to go viral, and how they spiralled to hugh viewing figures. Marco explained how these ‘free’ videos provided him with the ability to connect to a huge audience, and opened the door to sponsorships and product placement videos.

Marco really is an authority of the use of magic videos on sites such as YouTube, and it was great to hear him impart some really excellent advice on its use. He finished the set with his wonderful augmented reality based effect (the below was the preview he put on youtube of version 1)

Max Maven took to the stage next to give a wonderful talk on who he considered was the first close up magician. It’s always a pleasure listening to how Max works out all the reasoning of something to reach a single answer. He looked at the facts in his opinion of what was ‘close up magic’, and what constituted a ‘close up performance’, the contract with an spectator, the working space of the performance. It was an interesting journey along Max’s thinking, and, who was the first closeup magician? well, maybe you should sign up to the convention and find out..

Then followed a great performance by Finn Jon, one of the performers I never tire of watching, presenting his well known classic set, Finn Jon ’smoked’ cards and his thumb, turned paper to money, and produced bubbles.

It was a great Finn Jon performance, with everyone having a front row seat

Helder Guimarães was next up, opening with a lovely selected card that duplicated itself onto blank cards, ending with the selected card being the only printed card in the deck.

Helder then talked through his view of ‘The Mental Path’ of how he perceives audiences see an effect. This covered areas such as the audience knows there is no such thing as real magic, and how the audiences perception of something can create convincers in the effect, basically allowing them to be fooled because of that they believe they saw, heard, or felt. He then explained the effect, which demonstrated a number of the points on the ‘path’ about how it the effect worked in a spectators mind.

Richard Wiseman was next up, as always he was extremely funny, a phycologist by trade, he looked at visual illusions, and physiology, talking about ‘change blindness’ something that can be seen by the following Video from Richard:

It was a great talk as Richard talked through why he thought some magic worked, and the audiences perception of what they assumed they saw (either removing elements, or constructing ones to fill gaps)

Cyril Takayama performed a great manipulation routine, dedicating it to Mahka Tendo, who was a close friend of Cyril, and an inspiration to him.

It was a wonderful manipulation routine set to the music ‘Shape of my Heart’, and worked well in the studio setting. He received wonderful applause from the studio and the virtual audience.

Closing the session for the day was De`Vo, again without exposing his face, he talked about how card manipulation is a rapidly growing area, and how ‘manipulation’ in his terms is manipulation of standard everyday objects, pens, rings, cards, and mobile phones for example.

He explained how he, and many others have broken away from ‘magic’ to create ‘extreme card manipulations’ or XCM as its commonly called, something that is an art form in its own right, and something much more than just ‘flourishes’.

He ran through some examples of production XCM videos for adverting, such as Nokia, proving the demand for these sorts of skill.

The day ended with the normal Question and Answer Session, bring another wonderful packed day to an end.

We are proud to be a media partner of the Essential Magic Conference that is taking place July 15-16-17 2010. The Essential Magic Conference is the world’s first web conference for magicians. No Hotels to worry about, no flights to miss.. just 33 speakers over 3 days of conference streamed live worldwide.

You can find out more about it over at the official Essential Magic Conference site. You can also read all our coverage on the Essential Magic Conference.