Here is a little video that I made recently. I am kind of talking about it if it is a sleight of hand trick with dice on the video but actually it is not. Although I do really like magic, in fact after teaching English it is one of my main interests, this video is not really magic video. Well it is, it is just not sleight of hand like I say it is. But then again magic tricks are rarely what the magician says they are. Normally whatever the magician says it is is normally a red herring designed to throw you off.
So It is actually just done with some editing software. I had seen some similar videos about how to cheat when throwing dice and I came across one which had a lot of views where a man would say some numbers and then throw those numbers. After a moment or two it became obvious to me that the audio was recorded separately when he knew what the numbers were going to be and then dubbed it over the original video. There were many comments in the video that were saying how obvious it was. So I thought to my self, how can this be less obvious? Well if you could see the person’s mouth at the same time as the dice it would be a lot more convincing. So I set about fiddling about with the masking options in final cut pro.
The final video was actually my 3rd attempt. The first 2 were dismissed due to problems with lighting and positioning that made the masks too difficult to cover.
So it was done in post production. Does that make it less magic? I am not sure. I am pretty sure that Magicians like Derren Brown have done similar things. Check out his trick with a goal keeper and another with a psychologist in America. They were basically the same trick but with different skins and it is similar to this.
In my opinion, the important thing is that people enjoy it.
In my next post I will be talking about how to make youtube subtitles in srt format for your videos.