Making The Modern Magic Poster
Credits censored because I wrote inappropriate things to make Shane Cobalt laugh.
Behind The Scenes Look at The Modern Magic Show Poster
Shane Cobalt and I started talking about doing a show together in late 2013 or early 2014. We spent a lot of time on the phone talking about magic and our different approaches and put a show together that became Modern Magic. One of the things that I was adamant about was that we had a great poster. Most magicians today don’t have real posters made for their shows. Instead, they use photographs or nothing at all. David Copperfield as well as Penn & Teller have a singular poster for their shows. David Blaine always has beautiful posters illustrated for his stunts. In the past all the great magicians used posters in their shows. The posters showed vignettes and highlights from their show. People who had not seen the show would want to see those iconic images come to life on stage and people who had seen the show could show others the poster to help describe their experience of the show. I took great inspiration from buddy cop film posters as well as historical magic posters and began to make concepts.
Our show was called Modern Magic after a famous treatise on magic by Professor Hoffmann. This book made so many great magicians and we wanted to pay tribute to it with the type and logo. First I made it empty with Modern Magic standing out in gold.
Then I decided to make it gold like the book cover but have the text and art in a beautiful crimson red instead black.
Next was the color. I photoshopped in some color so we had some life in us.
I wanted us to be in the middle of some action demonstrating dexterity. So I had myself shuffling a deck of cards and springing them into a waterfall cascade. This is a real shuffle and cascade that I perform with the deck on the table. I didn’t want a table blocking me in the poster so I decided that you would only see our upper bodies and smoke underneath. Shane Cobalt was drawn in a display of his billiard ball routine in which balls appear, disappear and dance at his fingertips.
Finally I drew a curtain up top to fill up the space as well as some flowers on the bottom.
We chose the strongest moments of the show and took pictures of those moments.
Then we sent everything off to a friend and artist in Sweden, Stefan Eriksson.
Stefan started off with making a sketch of the poster with all the concept art we sent him as well as notes and other references.
The design evolved and we ended up shifting the billiard ball act to a vignette in a bubble down below and instead we had Shane holding black and white confetti in an incredible moment from our show.
Once the whole thing was sketched out our artist filled in the details with black and white shading.
The poster ended up looking amazing even before the coloring process. The vignettes feature the card through handkerchief, the billiard balls, and my version of the hydrostatic bottle.
The poster was unveiled to magicians in Montreal
The original was framed and displayed in the lobby of our shows. Many guests took turns standing with us to get photographed beside us.
After one such trip I was responsible for bringing the poster back home to Canada. It was rolled up and carried by me on the airplane. Usually I carry all my luggage out of the airport when I land but when I arrived in Toronto I had too much to carry and grabbed a cart to carry my luggage in. I’m used to all my bags and loaded them into the cart and the poster completely slipped my mind. I left without it. When I got home I realized what had happened and I immediately went back to the airport. Security would not let me into the baggage claim. I begged and begged and after about an hour of making a fuss I was let in. Amazingly the poster was exactly where I had left it even though it had been sitting there for over three hours. I was shocked as anyone could have picked it up and left with it and thousands of people passed through that exact same walkway. The original is now kept at Shane Cobalt’s house. Perhaps one day we will make prints available.
