“Show Reel” is a prediction of the name of an actor or actress that appears in the spectator’s favourite movie, and more.
In effect, the performer shows the spectators a movie page supposedly torn from an inflight magazine. It shows about 2 dozens popular movies together with a list of highlighted actors and actresses who appeared in each of the movies. A spectator is asked to mentally select his or her favourite movie, and then to find the actors or actresses named in the spotlight list, and to select one of them. All this is carried out while the performer turns his head to one side.
The performer then turns around and proceeds to divine the spectator’s thought-of actor or actress.
As a finale, the performer then shows how the spectator was influenced in her choice of this actor or actress. There are subtle indications of the name of this actor or actress elsewhere in the sheet of the torn page.
You receive 3 copies of this “torn” magazine page. It is nicely printed on both sides. The reason for the 3 copies is in case you need to fold the page in a certain way for close-up performance, and in another way for stage performance, and also to use as spares. You also get a link to a 3 hours 40m minutes of video tutorial with Michael Murray covering every aspects of the effect, including the credits and history, and different presentations.
The 2-page magazine sheet is delightfully and very cleverly designed so that when it is folded into a small packet, certain words or names become obvious. The page is printed on good quality paper so that it can be folded repeatedly in many ways, without wearing out the paper. It is not made of indestructible paper because the paper needs to be able to be folded repeatedly in both ways.
The divination of the celebrity’s name is based on the principle of Mental Yarn by Bill Goldman. There is virtually no memory work needed for this.
The main drawback, especially for non-English speaking spectators, is that they may know their favourite movies, but they may not know the proper names of the actors and actresses in those movies. You will have to qualify your spectator very well when using him or her for this effect.
I have overcome this problem by finding the same movie posters used in the page and printing them out as mini posters. On the back of each poster, I print the names of the casts, the director, the music composer, the date or release, the running time of the movie, etc. Now the spectator has the proper names of the actors and actresses of their selected movie and can properly participate in the trick.
In the tutorial, Michael discusses how to perform Show Reel prop-less, how to perform for multiple participants, how to repeat for the same spectators, how to use Show Reel with other movie themed effects, and many more, including a one-ahead principle to divine an imaginary movie title and the selected actor or actress.
If you can solve the little problem of qualifying your spectators, then this is a fantastic pack very small and play very big effect. (Rated 4.5/5 stars)
