How does teller do the shadow trick

They were great to see live. If I remember correctly, it comes from a deep rooted hate of how certain people use trick magic and play it off as super natural phenomina. By explaining the tricks they immediately remove any idea of super natural magic and then follow it up at the end with a trick that wasn't explained. It shows their skill at the act amazingly well when they walk you through how it works AND you still can't figure it out.

My favorite magic acts are ones where you can be told how the trick is done and it's just as amazing or even more so. Like this one, or ones where people do card tricks by feeling tiny differences in the print of the cards.

Kind of like the Chapelle joke from one of his netflix specials where he tells you the punch line in advance, but still makes you laugh.

Even knowing the thread in in his hands and seeing his fingers move to twirl the thread on occasion, that's still such an insane trick. Beautiful and moving, sure. But the talent required to do this trick versus Red Ball is lightyears apart.

For real. Sometimes magic isn't even about crazy tech or fancy mechanics, but really subtle and beautiful body movement. To think he had a string on the ball the entire time and still create the illusion is incredible. I also gotta advocate for his goldfish trick.

Still does. There are also coins hidden on him and at the back of the chair. You can't tell he's taking them or hiding them but definitely some stashed around. Impressive sleight of hand anyway. All the fish are behind that wall. Even when he switches hands.

I think he is the one who is controlling the thread, look at the slight movement of his other hand as he is cutting the flower. Isn't there some sort of limit to these things? You can't just do the whole trick with a bunch of helpers off-stage right? Plus he'd have to travel with them. If I remember right this routine is set to music. So the flowers are held up by some sort of contraption that goes off at certain points.

So with the practice and music to guide makes the illusion work. When I was in high school we did a production of beauty and the beast, and the stage crew built a rose that they could control when the petals fall off using magnets.

I imagine this is something like that. My guess, knowing nothing about magic: The petals are held on by a wax or soluble glue or something. And the flower stem is made from a wire or thin tubing. There is someone with a button hiding behind the camera somewhere , and right as Teller does the cut, he hits the button, heating up the wire inside the stem, causing the wax to melt, or releasing some water through a tube inside the stem, melting a soluble glue that is holding the thing together.

I have no idea if that is how he does it. But that seems like a pretty feasible way of doing it. The plant has wires running through it that tug and pull plugs out from the flowers at a set time from the start of the set. Teller knows how long it takes each bit to fall so uses the knife to look like he's cutting the shadow.

I'm thinking that the non-knife hands are twisting a wire of sorts There seems to be some twisting of the fingers when attention is naturally drawn to the knife. Keep an eye on the other hand, it's either weirdly positioned or out of sight. Penn said on Bullshit that 5 people in the world know exactly how their bullet catch is done, and the other 3 work for them. I can't see them just using any old stagehands to help them. Most comments I see are just people saying what they think it is, but obviously no one here knows for sure.

I don't know why anyone would get mad at speculations though. Reddit is obnoxious when it comes to magic. The thing that turned me off magic was obnoxious assholes trying to look behind the curtains WHILE I was doing the trick. Reddit is filled with those assholes. He wouldn't say how it's done, but he wouldn't lie about not knowing how it's done either. What would he have to gain from lying? Why would "I don't know how it's done" be more beneficial than "Sure I know, but I'm not telling"?

Dude this is Reddit, the site that claimed that an innocent man was part of the Boston bombings bullying him into suicide. I saw this live many years ago in Vegas, the whole show is amazing and I recommend it to anyone looking for a great show while you are there.

They even hang out in the lobby afterwards to chat and take pics with the audience, like you leave through the theater doors and they are just standing there chilling. You get the great joy of hearing Tellers voice as well. They are both fantastic and down to earth people who have larger than life personas on stage.

I saw him do this live in Boston back in , even got to go up onstage as a ten year old to throw a dart at their biblical dart board. Fun fact: magic tricks are not something that can be protected by patent or copyright law.

But the performance of the trick, and the choreography can. Thus when this trick was stolen by a Belgian magician they sued to stop him from using it. I think he has some kind of remote or something in his hand not holding the scissors. That said.. But I have no idea how that plays into this. I see you're not familiar with the grappler! My favorite Penn and Teller trick was when Teller was run over by an 18 wheeler on the Letterman show in The trick was revealed afterward.

I love misdirection and how people interpret what they see. I won't spoil the trick. Right, this was one kind of obvious, with how fake the tyres looked and how easily and unrealistically they bent around him. He's been doing this trick since the 90s so I doubt the remote idea. But let's just enjoy the trick without ruining the magic. I feel like using high tech stuff cheapens stage magic. Call me old fashioned or a gate keeper but to me magic seems less magical when the illusion can be explained by 21st century tech.

It takes a lot of the slight of hand, misdirection, and clever engineering out of the process. Penn and Teller aren't known for for cheaping out, thankfully. They're dedicated to their craft. That's what led to the lawsuit, and before it got to summary judgment ruling this week, Teller went to lengths to punish Dogge for copyright infringement.

Teller had to hire a private investigator to locate Dogge to serve papers to him, and for a while, Dogge evaded service in Belgium, Spain and other European countries. So Teller did a neat new trick. He emailed the court papers to Dogge and managed to convince the judge that his imitator had opened them. It was enough for the judge to allow the lawsuit to proceed. I saw this live about 20 years ago and Penn told a story about human tenacity while Teller did the trick.

It really added a crazy emotional aspect to the performance. Of course, it also made the trick last about 15 minutes. I've seen this so many times and it just dawned on me that it could be something that dissolves, it's all probably timed just right and the flower sucks up whatever chemical to dissolve a "glue" that's holding the leaves and petals in place.

I honestly don't think this is it. There's too much left to chance with this. If you even once have a manufacturer defect, the whole performance would fall apart due to something falling off before it's supposed to.

Thay've been doing this trick for over 20 years now. It would be almost impossible to not have some sort of defect or timing mismatch occur, no matter how many times it's practiced. Completely agree. Timing is perfect every time. Ambient room temperature would completely screw this up. Electromagnets, with a voltage controller that allows you to slower lower the magnetism by decreasing voltage.

Would be a much simpler and more tried and trued approach. Wires would be discussed in stem that come from the power source, ends of the stems would be the electromagnets and the parts that fall off would contain some sort of metal like iron.

Other commenters' insane theories for how he's doing this just goes to show how great the trick is. Let me tell you as someone who used to dabble in magic: the fewer, more easily controlled variables, the better.

I guarantee there's an elegant method. Ive seen a lot of theories, and I think a lot of people are close. They make very high guage wire that is basically insulate with an incredibly thin coating, and placing shorts strategically on the flower and completing the circuits on the canvas would make sense.

Instead of relying on formal legal mechanisms, magicians derive benefit from their inventions through informal social norms that encourage magicians to give due credit to the original inventor of a particular trick. You must login or create an account to comment. Skip to main content Teller performing. Timothy B. Lee Timothy is a senior reporter covering tech policy, blockchain technologies and the future of transportation.

He lives in Washington DC. District Judge James Mahan states that explicitly. What is protectable under copyright law is pantomimes, the art of conveying emotions, actions and feelings by gestures.

The theatrical medium where magicians work has some of the flavor of pantomimes , and Teller has used it to his advantage. The light falls in a such a manner that the shadow of the real rose is projected onto a white screen positioned some distance behind it.

In , Teller even registered Shadows with the U. Copyright Office in He included pictures:. Teller has been performing this trick for nearly four decades. Email Address. While U. A dramatic work is defined as a composition generally in prose or verse that portrays a story intended to be performed for an audience, while pantomimes and choreographic works typically include directed, organized movement by a performer with a story or theme conveyed throughout the movement, presented in front of an audience.

But which, if any, of these categories eligible for protection do magic tricks fall under?