A young man from the Netherlands. With little to no creativity... Check out his demo reel:
Does it feel familiar? Does it ring a bell? No... "Real Secrets of Magic by David Stone" He copies the effects, the angle, the whole framing, even the background. Even the bumpers are copied. Magic Steve even took the music from the DVD. This is no longer an homage, this is theft. (Love how the video at 2:05 says "unique, trendy and creative")
Of course he steals from others as well, but think about what kind of person he must be in order to shamelessly not be creative and unique. Most are uncreative because they fail at it, not because they do not try! But here we have a lazy and magicians who simply doesn't seem to give a shit about being original.
Well at least you got a nice title.... it's called Weekly Magic Failure.
btw, does the top photo remind you of something?
I dont think you can really use the top photo. I have a poster of Thurston in my room with the two devils on the shoulder, and have seen it on countless vintage magic posters. So unless you are going to criticize Derren for the same reason I don't think you can really mention this, in all fairness...And looking at Derrens again, the devil appears to be an exact cut and paste from the Thurston The Great Magician- the wondershow of the universe poster devil.
ReplyDeleteHold on a second... the imp was a popular advertisement gimmick for quite a few magicians from the past. I am a dead certain that Derren Brown knows this and uses this imagery with the knowledge and the respect for all those before him.
ReplyDeleteMagic Steven however is using it, because Derren Brown uses it. Quite a difference there.
I agree on Derrens use of the imps as a homage, and with the 'copycat' point you are trying to make, I just wanted to point out that the usage of the imps is a fairly generic motif of the magician, not unlike the rabbit and the hat, or the magic wand. So i thought that extra piece of evidence was slightly redundant, though I do concede your overall point...Such a shame, he has obviously done 90% of the journey and if he spent another 10 minutes thinking about those sequences/framing etc, he could of easily come up with something more individualistic and of his own style and possibly even taken it to the next level. You never know what will happen if you just invest that next 10 minutes working on something and not taking the easy way out.
ReplyDeleteRoland, I could not resist posting this on the biggest Dutch magic forum. I'll let you know if anything interesting comes up.
ReplyDelete