Spirits of the Past is putting on its glad rags and going to a festival, kind of...

I'm very pleased to announce that a little movie I made last year, Spirits of the Past, has made it into the Unofficial Google+ Film Festival.

It's not the catchiest name for a fetsival admittedly, but considering the concept behind Spirits of the Past - a film made entirely online, from first draft to final cut - getting its festival debut at a festival which only exists online is quite fitting.

For more info on the festival, its origins, and how you can get involved, check out the neat video below and visit them online here: http://www.ugpff.com/

#meetandtweet goes viral

Well then, this is a thing huh?

There have been all sorts of twists and turns, so for my own benefit as much as anyone else's, let's break it down.

Thursday. The story hitting the BBC was where it started. I got a few new followers, a bunch of kind messages. This is cool. This is totally cool. Well written, fact checked, a nice little fun story. Something you'd see on That's Life. I'm a dog that says sausages.

Then thenextweb.com picked up the story, and from there, the internet news cycle sent the story worldwide. I started getting messages and followers from Mexico and China and Spain and Russia.

привет!

There was a crucial difference between the two stories though. The BBC pointed out that I was going to stop at 150. That was my end goal. Thenextweb reported that I was meeting EVERYONE. My follower count doubled overnight.

I'm 4 followers away from hitting 150. Part of me was quite looking forward to finishing so I could start working on writing the show. Also, I start a masters degree in two weeks so I kind of need to focus a little.

But now I have all these new people following me from all over the world. I'm sure they're all fascinating and smart and I definitely want to chat with them, and clearly a bunch of them were keen to chat with me. So I came up with a compromise.

150 is the end of the story. It's the punctuation mark of a project I started back in January. However, I'm going to continue doing the #meetandtweet's with new people too. Maybe make it a monthly feature on the blog. This is totally manageable. I only have 450 followers, I could just take my time with it. Plus now all the news stories were out there so I wasn't getting anymore followers.

Haha, right.

Friday. Around 5.30pm my follower count exploded. In twenty minutes, it went from 470 ish to 12,800. This is ridiculous. I was bemused as to how this happened. I sent out a tweet asking anyone who had followed me in the past 20 minutes how they heard about it.

I only got one response, and it was incredibly offensive, but the tone was basically 'Hey man, I didn't follow you, you're cheating, you're buying followers!'

I initially dismissed it as just regular internet aggression, but when I started checking a few of the people who had followed me, I noticed many of them had been inactive for years. Or had only 1 or 2 tweets. They were zombie accounts. The exact type of accounts you'd get if you were to buy them.

I'd been trolled.

Imagine you're some mischievous dude with skills and time, and you see some story about a guy who wants to meet his twitter followers. What would be funnier than buying 12000 followers and latching them onto his account?

Again, this is all an assumption, but it seems to make sense. Both the nature of the people following, the sudden explosion, and the logic of the troll To be fair, it is quite funny.

The main annoying thing about it is that the story has popped again today after being in the Independent and the Daily Mail. (Please don't take this as an endorsement of the Mail. The guy that I chatted with was really nice but It's a terrible newspaper with no morality.)

Anyway, the point is I've got a fresh batch of new followers today that are probably cool and interesting but trying to parse them from the 12000 fakes is going to be tricky. I'll figure it out though.

Saturday. I've got a bunch more nice messages from folk today. (Some brutal ones too thanks to DM's comment section.) I appreciate them all but for real I'm not inspiring or amazing. It's totally cool if you think that, and thanks, but really I just had an idle notion on an afternoon, somebody noticed and THE INTERNET did the rest.

So yeah, we're up to date.

When I started this whole thing the only goals I had in mind were that I thought it'd be fun, and I thought it'd be a good story to tell. It's delivered both in spades.

Right, I'm gonna step away from the internet for a bit because to be honest, I'm getting pretty sick of the sight of me.

Stay gold.

#meetandtweet goes legit

So I was on BBC Radio Scotland yesterday morning. If you skip to 2.20.56 you can take a listen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03903n6

The radio link is no longer live but I have an mp3 of the interview and of the subsequent mugging off which I've attached below:

It was a 45 minute chat truncated to just over 5 so it's a bit choppy but hopefully I don't come across as a total dick. Go and take a listen, I have a few things to say about it. It’s cool, I’ll wait.

You done? It’s OK right? Positive chat, people are good etc. I should have said asymmetrical rather than asynchronous but whatever. Big thanks to Sarah Toom for being interested enough to get in touch and for the great chat.

That bit after the chat though eh? Oof. Mugged off by Kay Adams and the news team. Not the best advice? I hope my children don't hear that? I take umbrage.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the instinct. I don’t have any kids but I’ve got a huge family and I’m currently looking after a budgie so I can fully understand the natural instinct to shield them from danger. I don't want to discourage you from being safety conscious, but I hate to think of the great things you might miss out on. Listen: I have met a lot of strangers from the internet, and nothing but good has come from it.

Your mileage may vary, etc. but this completely rings true for me. It is an objective fact. I don't just mean the meetandtweet thing either. In many ways my history with meeting strangers on the internet is one of the reasons that I was so keen on starting the whole endeavour. My life, job, friends, relationships & location would all be completely different if it wasn't for people I met online.

The first internet strangers I met were from forums, which was where I spent much of my early internet life after some brief trolling of AOL chat rooms in my mid teens. It was around 1999 I joined my first forum. I made friends. After a year or two of daily interaction we decided to meet up. It was like university in microcosm. Everyone was a bit awkward and uncomfortable and we all drank too much and by the end of the night many people were best friends forever and had a bunch of stories to tell.

Since the advent of social media, this type of meet up, while it certainly still exists, doesn’t feel as prevanlent to me. Despite the fact that there are siginificantly more people online now than there was in the late nineties, I feel like fewer people are connecting. Facebook doesn’t really work for this because it’s essentially just an extended address book but twitter totally does.

Now granted, when you meet people on a forum there is generally a reason you’re all there, a common interest (videogames in my case) that you perhaps don't get with twitter. Still, by following people and engaging with them about things you're interested in, it's easy to gradually pick up on the things they're interested in and find common ground.

So go and meet some strangers.

Kay, I know it was just an off the cuff remark and you probably didn’t really think about it beyond stranger=danger but I’m certain your kids have enough wits about them to know when something is a bit iffy. I have probably met at least a thousand people in my life and yes some people have been weird or annoying but not a single one of them has been any danger to me.

Just don't be an idiot: I don't want to get a message from someone telling me they went and met a bunch of strangers and now they're on heroin and called Starchild. Meet somewhere public, meet in groups, have an exit strategy. But please don't assume strangers are a threat. You're a stranger to most people in the world, and you're cool, right? Be safe, but be bold.

You will have a good time or at the very least have a new story to tell.

Only 9 more to go!

Check out the previous updates: Here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Spirits of the Past

!UGPFF-Unoffficial-Selection-laurels-SL-Text-Transparent.png

Impatience is a virtue. After filming my first short last year, I was keen to make another almost immediately. Just something fun I could throw up on youtube. As I started working through some ideas, I started to think about how long the previous short took. How much time I spent sourcing the cast and crew, organising locations, scheduling the shoot, editing the raw footage. Too much. I wanted it to be faster. I didn't want all that hassle. I'm a writer, I'm inherently lazy. Isn't there some way I could make a film, from initial idea to final cut, without ever leaving my sofa?

Spirits of the Past is what came from that idle notion. A movie made entirely online. The original script, the auditions, the table read, the rehearsals, the editing, the whole thing was done from my sofa. I've still not met half the cast in real life.

We did the whole thing live, a 15 minute take. Much of the editing was done live too. I was part of the hangout but hidden, and from there I was able to control the camera and move between the characters without Google forcing my hand. Once it was done I made a few tweaks, tidied up the sound as best I could, cut out some noise, and stuck some credits to the end. Aside from that this is essentially a raw live performance.

This is not the future of film. The audio and video quality isn't nearly good enough yet and the frame is limited (you can't record live hangouts on an iphone yet, so movement around locations is inherently tricky. I tried.) but as an experiment, as a proof of concept, I am extremely pleased with the results.

Huge thanks to all the actors who gave their time. Let me know what you think, share with your friends. Call up some old pals maybe, it'd be nice to catch up right? Stay gold.

Declan

#Meetandtweet - an update

Look at all these beautiful faces. I'm about a month in, and things are going swell. 15 out of a potential 176 ( it's a moving target since I get the odd new follower so this may well turn into some Sisyphean task but what isn't, you know?). That's not too bad going. I mean, it's not super efficient but whatever, give me a break.

Only 3 have been total strangers so far. I think that's where the real guts of the experiment is. Of the rest, some are very dear friends, some are people I've met just once or twice. All of them have been delightful. Honestly, not one boring chat. I suppose the very nature of trying to meet strangers from the internet for no reason other than to say hello and have a chat gives the whole meeting an unusual frisson.

The weirdness is a shame. I feel like I'm already building up to some grand conclusion in my head and it makes me a little sad. The fact that framing this whole thing as a project is the only way to make meeting people seem slightly less weird. If you've just met someone once, or if you only know of them through twitter, then asking them to go for a drink seems inherently odd (unless you have some kind of ulterior romantic motive). The immediate reaction from the somebody who isn't really your friend is, 'Why?' As though the act of just sitting and talking and being with other humans isn't enough. We're all so proactive trying to build lives and careers and I don't have time and who is that guy again? We lose track of why we're doing the very... I'm getting ahead of myself.

Of the fifteen so far, seven of them were from outside Glasgow, where I live. Two of them live in Hong Kong so I got lucky that they were home visiting because I don't have Hong Kong ticket money. I do have Edinburgh money though, and I took the first trip solely for the purpose of meet and tweet. Sadly, I chose the absolute worst day to travel. Rugby. My train from Glasgow to Edinburgh was the busiest train I've ever been on in my life. I spent the 45 minute journey belly to belly with a man twice my age, breathing into one another's mouths. It was so awkward I even tried to feign sleep. I don't think he bought it.

It's not all been easy going. Two weeks after starting, I wrote the following in my notes:

I hate this. I've created my own albatross. I don't have time for this. Will everyone will respect me less if I just quit (pro tip: NOBODY CARES) but I care, or I should care. Just keep going. It's a subquest. A way to farm xp. Increase your charm.

This was after I'd created a spreadsheet (five columns - twitter ID, date contacted, date chased, possible date, date met) and contacted about ten people who never got back to me. I didn't give up. I used a videogame analogy to convince myself not to stress about it. Also, what the hell am I even giving up? It's just meeting people. It's easy and it's brilliant and I encourage everyone to do the same.

I'll do an update after the next fifteen. Special thanks to the following:

@bennywebb, @jendavies, @cporteus, @raphski, @_insomnius_, @tightlinebar, @alabamaslim, @ukaser, @hot_piping, @guyphenix, @gavininglis, @keyeri, @verdandiweaves, @scottama, @billyrmagician

SWAHO

About 2 years ago I did some work on a theatre production of The Cherry Orchard. I was officially there to aid one of the actors in performing a few magic tricks. Unofficially I just hung around at rehearsals and soaked up the atmosphere. On one of the days I was chatting with the lighting designer and he told me this story of an amateur production of Shakespeare's Hamlet that he had been involved with. Just a few hours before the show was due to begin, one of the actors called in sick. I forget the part, but it was small, so we'll say Yoric to keep it simple. With no understudy in place, the director made a brash decision. They took one of the PA speakers, draped a coat around it and placed a hat on it's head, then rolled it out on stage. The director then delivered the lines via a microphone from backstage. The sheer magic and absurdity of that decision immediately stuck in my head, and the idea for the movie was born.

Many, many drafts later, I finally finished the script for Speaker with a Hat On. Wildly different to the original tale, I was nevertheless pretty pleased with it. i'll maybe do a blog post in the future of the writing process, and the million different ideas I worked through and scrapped in forming this. Let's see how it turns out though.

You see, it's now going to be a movie. Thanks to the hugely supportive and broad Glasgow filmmaking scene, I've been able to put together a cast and crew and we're going to begin shooting in a few weeks. Here's where you come in. The film is about stand up comedians, and for a few important shots, we need a crowd. If you want in, you can either sign up to the event here: http://www.facebook.com/events/215020191949189/

OR you can email me with the details of the people attending at the following address: info @ declandineen.com

Anyone can come, so feel free to share. I just want to keep track of names and numbers so that I know everyone who's coming along and that they know what they're letting themselves in for.

This is one of my absolute favourite card tricks. Its not fancy,...

This is one of my absolute favourite card tricks. Its not fancy, its not technical, its not even strictly speaking a trick. But it has surprise, which is more than most card tricks do.

The Showbiz Ghetto

It's the final of Britain's Got Talent tonight, and as they do every year, they ruin it by including singers and dancers. Singers and dancers get enough credit. They have their own reality TV shows. If you're a singer on Britain's Got Talent, you're cheating as far as I'm concerned. Britain't Got Talent should be using it's time slot to promote real variety acts. The ones who live outside the rock star limelight afforded to song and dance people and stand up comedians. I've compiled a youtube playlist of some of my favourite variety acts. These are people who have dedicated their lives to perfecting something with absolutely no practical use for the sole purpose of entertaining a crowd for a brief few minutes. These are my kind of people.

The Greatest Variety Show on Earth

Why the Legend of Zelda has the best story in videogames

YOU Immediately you disagree with me, and that’s fine. Young kid finds out he’s the chosen one and sets off on a quest to rescue the princess and destroy the object of power and thwart the evil overlord is hardly a groundbreaking narrative. It’s the monomyth in a green tunic. This isn’t the story I’m talking about, that’s all just context. I’m talking about STORY.

NEED

I’ve been writing screenplays for the past few years, and one of the things I’ve become increasingly nerdy about is structure, the architecture of a story. I’ve cycled through a bunch of different methods over the past few years; the beat sheet, the three act structure, the sequence method, but there’s one in particular that really chimed with me, Dan Harmon’s story circle.

GO

I was originally turned onto this through a Wired interview with Harmon late last year, I dug back through the channel 101 wiki and found Harmon’s original posts breaking down the story circle. If you’re an aspiring writer or have any interest in word science I urge you to do the same, it’s perfect.

1.YOU 2.NEED 3.GO 4.SEARCH 5.FIND 6.TAKE 7.RETURN 8.CHANGE.

SEARCH

I spoke to the Dr. Frankenstein of TV/Gaming convergence Mark Sorrell about this a few months back, and he wrote a great blog about how we should be using algorithms like Harmon’s to generate stories on the fly in game, creating stories that can adapt organically to the whims of the user. I’m excited by this idea, but it’s the future, and I worry that just like space colonisation and jetpacks, my body will have withered and died before we get there.

FIND

So what about now? Is it useful to even try? Stories and games are almost intrinsically opposed artforms, interactive versus passive. Games are things I interact with, so they immediately become my story. By trying to layer another story on top of that you’re just getting in the way.

Even the most lauded narrative games fall into this dissonant trap:

Nathan Drake may be a likable wisecracking hero during the cut scenes, but between the flirting and the snappy banter, I brutally murder literally hundreds of people.

Niko Bellic may be a tortured soul living out the American Nightmare, but my Niko likes to base jump and and set up trucks so I can do stunt jumps in my golf cart. (I also murder hundreds of people.)

Even Mass Effect with it’s expansive set of moral choices does't really effect the story at all. No matter how much of a dick my Shepherd may be, I’m still going to save the world.

TAKE

As soon as I take control of the character, then the story of the game is my story. Cutscenes will continue to be skipped, ingame emotional moments will be ruined by me careening about the closed set, and when Dom’s wife dies, I will make a cup of tea until I’m allowed to shoot aliens again. There's no hope.

RETURN

"Hey! Listen!" Zelda though, man. Zelda nailed it years ago. When I say Zelda, I’m referring to pretty much every version of the game since they've all had the same basic structure from the start. Some people seem to see this as lazy, but the structure is one of the master strokes, and the reason that Zelda is the greatest videogame story. Why?

You – Link

Need – To save Princess Zelda

Go – Out into the overworld

Serach – Adapt to the various enemies and traps around you

Find – you need a specific item to continue

Take – You need to make your way through Dungeons to get it

Return – You get the objects you need

Change – You are now able to rescue the princess

Granted, you could apply this structure to most narrative games (it is STORY after all.) What’s key about Zelda though, is that the story circle isn’t just a grand narrative laid over the top of the game, it is the structure of the game itself. Dungeon to dungeon.

You - Link

Need - The hookshot

Go - To the Dungeon

Search - Find your way around this new, alien environment

Find - The hookshot! Da-da-da-daaaa!

Take - The only way out is through the boss

Return - You defeat the boss and emerge to the overworld

Change - But now you have a hookshot, and suddenly you have a whole new way to play in the world.

CHANGE

The change is key here I think, because it’s not some faux emotional moment presented in a cut scene. It’s a change in me as a player. After every dungeon I have a new item and a new skill I can use to play the game in a different way. Now I have the hookshot maybe I can get that heart piece I saw back in Kakariko village? Or help the old lady rescue her sheep? It literally changes the world.

I realise talking about how great Zelda games are isn't exactly cutting edge, but man, how great are Zelda games?

A Review - Of me not by me

It's about my show at this years Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It's nice too, otherwise I wouldn't be sharing.

I had to see Declan Dineen Lies for Money, not least because I found the title of his show refreshingly honest in a festival where every show is, it seems, ‘five stars’, ‘unmissable’ or just ‘brilliant’. Declan describes himself as ‘a magician, writer and all around good guy’ and I spoke with him before his show. When you learn his early inspirations were James Randi, the American mathematician and science writer Martin Gardiner and cult magic de-bunkers Penn & Teller you understand where his show gets it edge from. Declan first performs then deconstructs a series of card and other tricks, alongside a narrative demonstrating how easy it can be to get taken in by charlatans. Part of Declan Dineen’s charm for me was the recognition that, intelligent as we all might like to think ourselves, few of us are truly immune from some sense of wonder or mystery at the seemingly inexplicable. The other part of his charm is that, having explained the trick, you still can’t help but admire the skill with which he performed it.

One point in the show involves writing compliments on pieces of card and putting them in a jar. I won’t spoil the fun and explain why. After the show, Declan stands by the exit and holds the jar, offering to exchange a compliment card for some of your cash. Even if you think you’re being fleeced, you still leave the show feeling good about yourself.

Full review here. Big thanks to the Skeptic mag for coming along to chat with me, and to Edinburgh Skeptics to inviting me along in the first place.

Stay gold.

Hard Cussing - A journey into the mind of the Edinburgh Fringe Audience

Here's the set-up. My show at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe was largely autobiographical. It was about what it's like being a magician in the 21st century. It was smart, self aware, and full of neat tricks. One of the bits was about how badly things can go wrong when you're working a room. When you first start out, you're so keen to impress whoever has hired you that you eagerly approach every table in the hope of giving them some unforgettable magic moment. What you only learn with experience is that there are certain tables that simply DNGAF about your tricks. This is totally fine, but it's a lesson learned the hard way.

To illustrate this at the show, I needed insults.

I had a group of people on stage to simulate the close up atmosphere and the intention was to create a really bad moment for a close up magician. The moment when you approach a table all charm and smiles only to be shot down with a horrific, soul crushing insult. To make sure people really took there time with this, I decided to get everyone in the crowd to write down an insult before the show began, totally anonymously. Imagine you finally get to say that thing you always wanted to say to that person you've always wanted to say it to. Treat it as therapy. At the appropriate moment in the show, I would approach the group on stage, one of them would reach into the glass filled with insults, pull one out at random, look me dead in the eyes and read it. It was a really fun bit to do.

NB: It wasn't all negativity. To counterbalance the insults I also asked everyone to write down the nicest, kindest compliment they could think of. These were then handed out at random as people were leaving, so everybody got a random compliment from a total stranger. You might be boaking at the thought, but I loved it.

Anyway, I've created a set of some of the insults on flickr here if you want to puruse them, but I wanted to share some of the more notable ones here too.

Firstly, the bizarre. I'm not entirely sure where the inspiration for these came from.

I wonder what the life experience of the person writing this was. Who has the image of a cow pissing in the garden ready made in their head? Why is that a bad thing?

This was the only image I got from the 300 or entries I received. I guess I'm not the only one who's had terrifying dreams about a Jewish Vampire Hitler.

Now, since the show was in the afternoon, there were a few occasions where some young kids would be in attendance with their parents, which could account for the absurdity and gentleness of some of the insults. This, for instance. The bogie monster. It's cute, it's exactly what you'd imagine a 6 year old boy or girl to write. Of course, not everyone in the crowd was quite as gentle with their insults which did cause some slightly awkward moments when the time came for an audience member to choose an insult.

I have to admit to having a certain amount of joy when an audience member pulled out an insult, looked at the 6 year old kid in the second row then looked at me, panicked before finally reading aloud :

The parents usually laughed it off and the kids thought it was brilliant, totally as it should be. There were very few occasions when the insult felt like it was too much, although going through the pile yesterday I noticed at least 3 different compliments. Maybe the people just didn't have enough hatred and bile in their system to write something truly insulting, or they got confused, and there were a few people who left the show thinking they had a wonderful compliment from a stranger only to discover their paper said, You are a donkey's cunt. If you are one of those people, I'm sorry. You are not a donkey's cunt. You are a victim of someone else's stupidity.

In fact, cunt was perhaps the most commonly used word in the insults, and after a while it loses some of its magical powers. Even the wealth of terminal illness insults like, 'Your face has AIDS' or 'Your worse than Cancer.' (sic) failed to shock after a while. There were only a handful that really pushed it, that really gave you that pit of the stomach feeling.

These were the type of insults that hush a room, the type of insult that, if I were back in school and someone said it, one of the snickering kids in the background would be all, 'Aww, that's tight man, you can't say that. That's well tight.'

The insult?

That's tight man, that's well tight.

Fringe show 2011 - Day 1

So there was a mishap. Nothing major, hopefully we all still had a good time, but there was a technical hitch. There was a section of my show which was nothing but video and chatting, but the video failed. As such, if you were at the show and you tracked me down in the hope that I would stay true to my word and add that section to my website later today, you're diligence will have been rewarded. Here it is:

It's an addendum to the point I had raised earlier in the evening to the way in which magic started to permeate my life in ways I never imagined. Firstly in terms of relationships (you'll have to come to the show to see that) and secondly in terms of movies.

As a magician, you learn how to misdirect. It's fundamental to deception. As such, I found myself rewatching old movies and forcibly trying not be be led by the director, to try and take in the whole image instead of follow the action. It's a terrible flaw, and one that has since ruined some of my favourite movies.

Take North by Northwest for example, a Hitchcockian classic, a thriller from the master of tension. Watching it more recently however, the tension and drama of the scene is sucked out immediately by a small kid in the background. Take a look:

North by Northwest

A more infamous example can be discovered in this short clip from the end of Back to the Future 3.

BTTF3

So now you know the kind of stuff you're looking for, watch the first 25 seconds of the following clip and pause it. The gaff has already happened, but see if you can spot what it is.

Bad Boys

Now watch the end of the video, and you'll see the problem highlighted. I think you'll be surprised.

Totally pro

Via @ericmead

How to blow people's minds using Social Networks

It's the holiday season fast approaching, and you're no doubt going to be spending time with the Griswalds, so I thought I'd share a little trick I thought of a few days ago that you can use to kill some time and amaze some relatives. I'm going to ramble a bit first of all, so skip down to 'Here is what you need' if you just want the meat of the trick. I had a show cancelled yesterday. No big deal, just a scheduling mishap. I spent most of the day updating the various social networks I'd used to promote the show. I needed to use all of them, because different people would see different streams. It was at this point that an idea probably formed in my head, but it didn't come to life until a few hours later.

A few of the people who were coming to the show got back to me to let me know they weren't going to be able to make the new, rescheduled show. Not wanting to let them down, I offered to go to their place and do a parlour show for the handful of people who couldn't make it. They accepted, and I set about getting ready for the show. Just before leaving the house, the idea that had started a few hours earlier pinged, and just before I left the house I made the necessary arrangements to blow people's mind using a social network.

'You don't even need to look at them, just visualise one of them. Use whatever instincts you have, you will be drawn to one of them. Okay, are you done? Tell me which card you're thinking of.'

'Aren't you supposed to tell me?' The young lady sat opposite me quite rightly points out.

'I've already made my decision, I'll reveal it in a moment and you'll see quite clearly that I made the prediction a good half hour before I arrived at this show.'

'Okay, okay well I'm thinking of the queen of spades.'

'That was a free choice correct? I mean, you could have chosen anything, I gave you the chance to change your mind even.'

'You did.'

'And yet you've stuck with this one? There's no way I could have influenced you? I didn't give you a tenner before the show to tell me exactly what I wanted to hear.'

'No! It was a free choice.'

I point to the laptop sitting next to her. 'Open that up and go to twitter.com/declandineen. Check out what my last post was.'

And they go to the website, and there is the post, and there, quite clearly timestamped an hour earlier, is my prediction. http://twitter.com/#!/declandineen/status/13679652279164928

Now, you too can blow people's minds on social networks!

Here is what you will need:

Five things, one of which will be chosen by a member of the audience. (I used cards mainly because I had the idea for the trick fairly last minute and they were the quickest things to hand. Of course, once you know the secret, your imagination is your only limit.)

Access to the internet.

The trick

Lay five objects in front of someone. Tell them they are to think of one of them. You're then free to make up any kind of nonsense you like about a 'feeling' you had before you left, or a premonition of the future. Whatever you like. The trick works by itself so you're only worried about how awesome you want to make yourself out to be.

Hell, make a bet out of it, have a drink on me.

They then choose an object. You then direct them to your chosen social network and show that you predicted it almost an hour earlier.

Take your applause.

The work:

So how do you make them choose that specific object? You don't. What you do is just use lots of social networks and a small amount of memorisation. You hedge your bets. You use what magician's call, 'multiple outs.'

Using the example above, the lovely woman at my show chose the Queen of Spade so I directed her to www.twitter.com/declandineen and said she should take a look at the latest tweet, which at the time, was this;http://twitter.com/#!/declandineen/status/13679652279164928

However, had she chosen the Ten of Spades, I would have told her to go to declandineen.com and click on the blog, which would bring her here: /wp/?p=441

Jack of Spades? http://www.google.com/profiles/declan.dineen

King of Spades? http://www.facebook.com/declandineen

Ace of Spades? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD9dfLNNNE

This is why I have five objects in mind, because for me, those were the five social sites I had used earlier in the day to contact people about the show. To me, those are the heavy hitters and the ones most people will have.

I do a lot of card tricks, so you do get to know the type of cards people will choose when asked to think of any. It's not an exact science, but you can predict which ones will be more popular for sure. With this in mind I did kind of weigh it so that google buzz would be the least likely chosen and that youtube the most likely. I figured the youtube reveal is slightly cooler because it's a video, and most people - whilst happy with facebook and twitter - will be a little 'Sorry, what?' when you tell them to go to your google profile. (Sorry google.)

So there you have it. A simple trick with a heavy punchline. Please do try it. If you do, I would love to hear how it goes, you can email me at: info@ declandineen.com.

Going to blow somebodies mind with this post in a few hours time

Camera Tricks

There's this stuffy idea that camera tricks are somehow not as artful or as clever as sleight of hand magic. There was an awful lot of hoo haa around Derren Brown's Predict the Lottery Special because he, alledgedly, used a type of live editing rather than some kind of supernatural form of future sight. Personally, I don't buy it. In magic, the method is the least important thing. Your aim is to get the desired feeling from your audience, you get it by any means necessary. If you're doing magic you're already lying, why pretend that there is some kind of honor system?

Aside from that, camera tricks are fun! I'm working on a bigger post about the history and fun uses of camera trickery you've perhaps never heard of before. I'll hopefully get this up later in the week, for now, here's a brief clip impromptu bit of camera trickery achieved last night in the heady excitement of learning how easy it was to live broadcast to teh internet direct from my phone.

It goes on a bit, skip to 1.30 for the fun part.

Watch live video from declandineen on Justin.tv

Original Ending for the Show

As promised, for those who came and didn't see the original ending, here it is:

Now, I suppose it's up to you whether or not you think I should have dropped it. I'm glad I did to be honest. I do mean what I say and hopefully present it well enough, but in my quest to try and differentiate myself from other magicians, to try and give something different, something with my personality etched in it, I was maybe forgetting that this was a magic show. This is why it split crowds I think. As a finale, people were waiting for the twist, the prestige, and it never really came.

Enough justification for now, this is closure.

Check back soon and often though, I have lots of plans for the blog in future, as well as a bunch of videos and news about upcoming shows.

Incidentally, it'd be remiss of me not to remind you I am available for all kinds of venues and bookings. If you want me to come play at your club or in your living room, I cater to all and sundry. Just drop me a line: info@declandineen.com

Stay gold

The Fringe

First Fringe finished, was it worth it?

It's almost impossible to quantify. To even begin to answer this question, you'll have to have set your own goals before hand. This is much harder than it seems. Before I started my run, I got possibly the worst heckle I ever received. It was on itricks.com, somebody had commented on the promo video I made for the show. The comment?

' I don't understand why he would do this.'

No doubt they were referring to the perspective skewing gag video, nevertheless the question itself does send a chill. Why am I doing this? If you're going to say honestly if it was worth it or not, you need to set some goals.

Realistically, all I thought I'd get was experience. Good and bad. I want to be better at this, so now I'm going to do that. But people who play the fringe are crazy and narcisstic, and we can't help but think that maybe someone will notice us? Maybe this is the ticket to the big time. We are such jerks.

Disregarding the daydreaming then, I'm going to genuinely see if I can't statistically prove that the Fringe was worth doing. Let's start with some cold hard cash.

I saved a fair bit by being part of the Free Fringe, which meant I didn't have to pay venue costs etc. The Free Fringe works on a donation basis, so the audience pay what they feel. This is beautiful and deadly.

Outgoing (approx) -

Officially being part of the Fringe - £300.00

Posters & Flyers - £120.00

Last minute props etc. - £60.00

Living expenses - £220.00

TOTAL - £700.00

Incoming (approx)

Average hat per show - £25.00

TOTAL (14 nights) - £350.00

So, £350.00 down. Not too bad, that means I've spent £350 on the experience. How do you quantify experience? I go with my gut. Every night after every show I wrote a quick message on Twitter giving my initial feelings of the show. I've included them below.

Day 14 - high fives all round. Day 13 - literally no one. Packed up to leave then a crowd of 20 or so met me at the door. I wanted to kiss every one of them Day 12 - magic, pals & late arrivals. A big bit went wrong, but I think I salvaged it, I'm pro Day 11 - mic check. One, two, one, two. Can you hear me Edinburgh? Day 10 - where the fuck did that crowd come from? Pay the man Joe. Plus John Booth & secret magic clubs. Good show Day 9 - three people asked for my autograph. Also got to say the line, 'If you get this wrong, I'm going to electrocute your daughter.' Day 8 - so, so tired. Old friends and new friends. Such a fickle mistress. Day 7 - hugged Leo Tan live on stage. Day 6 - it's not so good Al Day 5: aww yeah! Day 4 FML http://yfrog.com/6tfhhj There were about ten people eventually but I like to be melodramatic. Day 3 - Yuss Day 2. Everything went wrong. Horrific ten minute gap when i left the stage to search for a lost prop.Still claps enough though. Day 1, pretty shambolic but I'm out unscathed and paid. Cheers for the kind words.

So, a mixed bag of emotions, clearly. Let's separate the good from the bad.

GOOD

Day 1, pretty shambolic but I'm out unscathed

and paid. Cheers for the kind words.

Day 3 - Yuss

Day 5: aww yeah!

Day 7 - hugged Leo Tan live on stage.

Day 10 - where the fuck did that crowd come from? Pay the man Joe. Plus John Booth & secret magic clubs. Good show Day 9 - three people asked for my autograph. Also got to say the line, 'If you get this wrong, I'm going to electrocute your daughter.'

Day 14 - high fives all round. Day 13 - literally no one. Packed up to leave then a crowd of 20 or so met me at the door. I wanted to kiss every one of them Day 12 - magic, pals & late arrivals. A big bit went wrong, but I think I salvaged it, I'm pro.

BAD

Day 2. Everything went wrong. Horrific ten minute gap when i left the stage to search for a lost prop.Still claps enough though.

Day 4 FML http://yfrog.com/6tfhhj There were about ten people eventually but I like to be melodramatic.

Day 6 - it's not so good Al

Day 8 - so, so tired. Old friends and new friends. Such a fickle mistress.

Day 11 - mic check. One, two, one, two. Can you hear me Edinburgh?

Day 13 - literally no one. Packed up to leave then a crowd of 20 or so met me at the door. I wanted to kiss every one of them

Not bad, actually more positive nights than negative ones, although I did count day 13 twice, because it had it all. So, £350 pound for 9 good times and 6 bad times, some sickness and exhaustion, some massive reality checks, some new friends, some old friends and some neat ideas.

Totally, totally worth it. Thanks very much if you came to the show, you were all very smart and attractive. The promised alternate ending will be up by the end of the week.

Lies, Trickery & Deceit - A Magic Show!

Lies, Trickery and Deceit - A Magic Show!

Venue: Laughing Horse @ The Newsroom | Venue 93 | 5-11 Leith Street

Time: 19.30 to 20.30

Dates: 15th to 29th August 2010

Expect sardonic and artful deception, the ultimate revenge for a broken heart, and a questionable but valid-because-I-say-so psychological test.

This is literally where the magic happens; an intimate evening of secrets and lies presented with a sly wit and a devilish grin.

PROMO VIDEO

Lies, Trickery & Deceit - A Video

I should add, for the sake of full disclosure, that nobody actually asked me about the title of my show, I made that bit up for the purpose of my video.

What can I say, that's my schtick.