Naquada

After a bit of a sorry start to the day with lectures, Steve Shawn Farqurhar pulled it out of the bag with his lecture. Not only was he funny, both in his act, and his explanations, but what he did was just class, clean, clever and innovative.

The three time Fism Award winner delivered what he classed as classic stuff with a twist from his working material. He started his lecture by doing a classic matrix, but with a twist. He only used two coins, and he used photos of his hands to cover the coins, as opposed to his actual hands. He did a clean matrix effect, and repeated the effect to show the coin physically still in the photo on his hand. He repeated it again, but now with the classic four coins, and again with photos of his hands.. again ending up with the coins in the photo.

Another really nice effect that he explained was a great signed CD effect. Getting a spectator to sign a blank CD, he removed the silver from it, to leave the signature on a clear see through CD. Following this with another CD effect, where the names of two selected cards appear on the back of a previously signed and blank CD. The interesting twist was that only one selection appeared at a time.

The crowd really loved Shawn’s performance, and he continued to wow the audience with deck vanishes, where selected cards transposed places, and left the ‘deck’ as a solid clear block of glass, again he repeated the same effect, but instead of a solid block, he vanished all the faces and backs of the cards, except the spectators card.

The ended up by performing and explaining a really nice torn and restored photo of his daughter. Well, it was actually a torn and almost restored photo. In fact the signed photo was restored in the wrong order, leaving the spectator with quarters mismatched on the photo, but their signature still in place.

The whole lecture was really great, full of comedy, clever and visual magic, and really was a fantastic evening session.

Note that the reference to Steve Farqurhar not Shawn Farqurhar was an in joke and part of the competition to see who read all the posts in detail from Blackpool. It was also a play on the awful compere on the Saturday night misintroducing Shawn as Derek, and then David!!! You can see just how insulted Shawn was by this on his blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Blackpool2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.