I often think 'If you're going to do 'magic' on TV, there needs to be at least one camera on the magician's hands at all times with no cuts'.
If they can reach off camera and then suddenly 'magic', I'll assume they had it set up just out of sight, and everyone on camera is just in on it pretending to not see the wires/mirror/second deck of cards set up in the chair/etc. That's how nearly every 'magic' TV show works, and it's tiring. Slight of hand magic is nothing if you don't see the hands the whole time....IMO.

That was great. I love when magicians take the artistic approach, rather than the cheesy overperformed approach. So good.

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As for more ideas; I didn't hear if the Rubik's Cubes were random (as in P & T went and bought their own for this trick). If he brought his own Cubes, then things change again. Since after all he could be engineering Rubik's Cubes with some added perks.

It'd require some pretty good "quirky" engineering knowledge (and BTW, this is quite common with magicians)... But he may be able to make a Rubik's Cube that with a touch to a button, change in acceleration, heat & cold, etcetera, perform many simple yet crucial tricks to complete his act.

Anyway, it all depends on what his goal is for the Cube. He may NOT want a Cube that solves itself instantly with a press of the button (plus that may be a little too much over-engineered). But, you could have stickers that switch color via various means, like a switch based on temperature.

It all depends as well as what is available out there. There are a lot of very tricky things you could accomplish if you truly had the ability to get some of these items.

It's very hard to tell you what types of abilities this Cube could have; it's probably easier to tell you what features it wouldn't have based on the performance we saw (like I said, one that "solves itself" would more than likely be over-engineered)...

But, to me it's far more easier to see it via a extraordinary ability in sleight of hand and an extreme amount of experience with a Rubik's Cube (go look at Rubik Cube videos; there are a lot of people that do very neat things with Rubik's Cube...).

Nope. He did it in real time on the street in front of two police officers to get himself out of a ticket. And he shows all sides of it, so the guess by @Jinx is wrong as well. I haven't even a wisp of an inkling as to how this is done.

Rubik's Cube Magician Steven Brundage fools Penn & Teller... has been added as a related post - related requested by lucky760 on that post.

Magician gets out of Speeding Ticket with Rubik's Cube Magic has been added as a related post - related requested by lucky760.

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*lies

Fake! http://twitter.com/SkyNewsPR/status/624530153671004161 & http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/24/425881136/too-good-to-be-true-tv-reporter-was-in-on-magicians-photobomb from http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/3eg35a/magicians_perform_trick_live_in_the_background_of/cteoqww

Like I said in my first post above my little brother is a professional magician who designs a lot of these tricks and devices for TV shows. All I can say is you'd be amazed the lengths a magician will go to just to make a simple looking trick work. I think you'd be fascinated by it all.

The Magic Circle is a good organisation to join if you have an interest in magic. You need to be able to perform magic and be interested in learning how to do more, but that's all part of the fun.

An interesting aside about magical devices, they are never patented, as patent applications have to be made public. This means the devices themselves tend to be pretty expensive as the inventor may have only a short period of time in which to sell his idea before others start joining in. Simple magical effects (just the method for a trick printed on a piece of paper) can sometimes sell for hundreds of pounds. Everything about the magical world is strange and different. If you've got a keen mind and the technical know-how there may be gold in them thar hills for you

I was providing a more "technology tailored" way to fool us and how it might create a great magic trick. I also love magic tricks that make use of self-created "magical" devices (his vest counts towards what I'm talking about).

As I mentioned there are probably quite a few ways to do this trick and I wholeheartedly agree with you that the most likely way the majority of this was done was via misdirection and cues. As it is true with almost everything, the simplest answer usually is the truth.

I however, became interested with he kept moving his hands (and the "cards") to the same spots or moving them, repeating, the same movement over and over again right before the "change" or flip occurred (with other things as well like the smoke--and yes, I know it was more than likely misdirection--but, sometimes smoke is just smoke ).

That is what made me think of a scanner (mostly because I'm a computer/engineering/physics hippie and I have seen scanners that can be made to look exactly like that mat; but I also have learned a bit of magic, with that instead of becoming an amateur magician I instead learned about magic and it's history instead). But, like you said and I also said above in my comment, this all can/could be done through many various schemes. Using differing ways of that same scheme/idea, the same mechanics and/or devices, with sleight of hand and a lot of misdirection (very well done too, simply because there was so very much of it needed--which Penn & Teller commended him on in their own way).

His jacket for example is obviously HIS engineered creation. It has a lot of hidden and secret functionality; in fact it may have been the underlying foundation that allowed the whole trick to work so well (you never know just what exactly is the magician's biggest helper in many tricks). That is what I love, personally, about magic is the engineering and love--the workmanship--that can go into it. Every great magician definitely has that engineering facet to their personality; they all know how to create a device that gives them just what they need. I've seen so many magical devices and how they were used and how they're made as well and I must say, it is a terribly interesting thing to learn about and see done. Sometimes you have devices made just to perform one extremely small function, just to add that little bit of "panache" to a trick...

Every magician--good and average--however do have or need one thing in common no matter what, and this refers to what you talk about (and this magician may be leagues ahead of others, making all tricks completed in that same manner seem simple and mundane compared to what he can accomplish with the exact same, extremely fundamental, aspect to magic; pulling off tricks that almost all magicians would believe to be impossible using such a standard fare of abilities and methods): agility and sleight of hand. With this comes the uses for that "god-like" speed and manipulation. Use that with engineered tools (not necessarily what I mentioned--the scanner, printer, and ink method--but, things easier to craft and more likely to be used like his vest) and it can suddenly make any of the simplest tasks (or even tricks that other magicians perform) we do everyday, extraordinary if not miraculous.

I thought I'd add my idea, because I like to figure these tricks out as well; as I'm sure many of you are as well.

Overall, if I was Penn and Teller, I'd be most impressed with his ability to keep his showmanship intact while obviously needing great concentration on the trick at the same time--not to mention he keeps showing superb sleight of hand the whole time.

So many magicians are just amazing to watch. The tools they create (which can be so complicated that you'd never believe that someone would create such a thing or something fairly complicated to complete one very easy task) sometimes never let their presence be known--if done right. But in other cases you know there is "something" helping the magician, but you can't begin to imagine what exactly he has created or what exactly it is accomplishing for him.

I do wish they'd give us a general idea how these tricks are performed, without destroying the "magic" involved. Just tell us general things, like "misdirection and a magical device", etc... They don't need to explain it into it's minutiae.

I'll always love magic and the amazing use of the mind and the body to create illusions grand and small (or "magic" that just tests the limits OF the mind or the body; feats, as it were).

When the body and mind work together in perfect unison to create such wonderful uses of sleight of hand, feats, and "magical" devices...these are the type of people that will continue--hopefully for as long as humans exist--to create magic as real as it can get. Waking up the child inside us all!

/length

This is awesome

Magicians will go to amazing lengths to get a trick to work. However, the key part to just about all tricks is distraction. Not just to make you look away when a clever switch is made, but a well designed trick is a distraction in itself. It'll make you think that the amazing thing happening is one thing when in fact the amazing thing already happened when you didn't know amazing things were happening and now it's making the faux amazing thing look even more amazing!

Your idea with the ink disappearing on the card is a great example. You're trying to work out how the card ends up blank when he put the signed card on the table when the signed card was never put on the table. The card on the table is blank simply because he put a blank card on the table. The switch had already been made and you're looking for a solution to something that was never a problem

Magicians prey on you assumptions, and they're brazen, and a lot more skilled than you'd think. You won't work a lot of the stuff out because you'll think the way it's done is impossible, that no one could actually do what the magician is doing. Fan some cards out in front of someone and ask them to pick one at random. A good card magician can force you to pick a certain card and you'd never suspect it. I'm given to believe that Paul Daniels can do this behind his back. It's not easy to do and most people don't believe it's possible, so if you can do it you're performing the miracle at the very start. Everything after that seems incredible. You're looking for a trick that's already happened.

I love magic. I love being fooled. I enjoy the challenge of working out how things are done and wish I had the time to learn to do it properly.

Two options for that one, either also into the vest, but obscured from view by his left forearm, or it is behind his right hand and he dropped it into his pants. I decree that magicians should only be filmed in 60 frames a second.

There were a lot of different tricks in there. A part of me really wonders if the mat on the table is a "printer/scanner" and that "marker" is extremely important. There may be a time-released chemical that helps all of this go down (meanwhile he may actually have a small printer on his body somewhere). When the smoke appears that is when the "card" is doing it's chemical thing (as you could smother one card with this chemical making it fully black, but then the printer could change the chemical pattern again as it is scanned and therefore reset the card with the other signature...).

The truth is, I have no idea how it was done, but I think what he is wearing (and possibly what is underneath--not to mention the pockets that are very hard to determine their location or size), possible chemical reactions used in a few different ways, a slim printer, and a slim scanner. Plus all of the sleight of hand tricks you did or did not catch...

If true, he used some fairly complicated technological prowess, besides his agility to get this done. But, for ages untold the creations made and used by magicians are just as important sometimes as the act.

This would also be THE perfect trick to give Penn & Teller the slip, as they may have never ran across anything like this (I've run into tech that could easily do lots of this--scanner through things, etc; it just depends on what is in that pen exactly...think of it kind of like invisible ink, but it need not stay that way and it more than likely can be made to "dissolve" as some sort of inert gas).

Everything was done here flawlessly, even the music feed into the act making it harder to catch.

Phew, that is long enough and I may only have 50% or so right on this one.

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