Finch Platte Wrote:
They showed his "levitation" too, but never showed enough to see how it was done.
I saw something a couple years back on how he did it. Basically, what we saw on TV was not what the people saw. He may have performed an illusion of levitating for the people, but the way it was filmed for TV was all fake - we saw his feet actually lift off the ground, but the viewers on the street only saw a very clever illusion. The dude's talented, no doubt, but those shows were very edited to make things look a lot more shocking than they really were. Unfortunately, i can't find the original article on it, but I did find others commenting on it on the newsgroups:
Quote:
For the television special, Blaine performed the Balducci levitation in front of several different groups of people, and the camera was there to
catch their reaction. The method he used for this is the Balducci
method, described below. While videotaping these various performances,
the producers keyed in on the audience members with the most visual
reaction. After the Balducci levitation, the producers of the show had
these same people stand by for another taping of the illusion - this
time the camera would shoot from behind the audience members to get
aclear view of Blaine in action. The audience members were told that
this second performance was to show them how magicians could use wires to levitate. And this is exactly what happened. A small harness and rig (just out of camera view) was set up and Blaine performed a standard
wire-suspension.
What Blaine did was a camera trick - known as a post-production edit.
The audience at home watched the second (wire suspension) levitation
performance, with the audience reaction of the real levitation edited
in. It was said, in the television special, that no strings or wires
were used to perform Blaine's levitation. This is true, no wires or
strings are required. Unfortunately, we never got to see Blaine's real
levitation - we saw a wire-suspension.
Here's a site with pics of how to do it:
http://us.geocities.com/sibelius.geo/balducci.html
