Visual Magic and Ellusionist Secrets with Lloyd Barnes

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Lloyd Barnes grandfather became a travelling magician shortly after the war. He developed many tricks over the years and passed those onto Lloyd. His focus was much more on sport as a teenager – especially boxing and gymnastics. His university career was less than successful – he was thrown out in his final year. But that ignited his interest in magic and soon he was selling tricks and illusions that he developed himself. He was broke and homeless for a time and slept on many friends and families couches over the next few years.

Lloyd now works with Ellusionist. He scouts tricks from other performers and from submissions to the company. He helps to make them more practical and performable. When you send a trick to the company, he’s the guy that reads the email. The other part of his job is to shoot and edit the trailers for the new effects. Along with his own performing career that keeps him incredibly busy.

Lloyd has to watch an enormous number of submitted tricks. As you can imagine, many of them are really bad.  But not only that. He gets people submitting tricks with very little research. He once had a young magician submit the double-lift to him as a new trick. He’s always impressed when he receives a trick that was recorded in front of a real audience. It shows that the magician worked out and thought about how the trick should be performed.

When Lloyd is creating his own magic he takes a very strict approach. He doesn’t try to change a move just for the sake of changing it. There has to be a reason for doing it. It has to make the trick better. And there are some avenues to be explored within existing methods but they are pretty rare. Lloyd recently released an Instagram showing a bill melting through a card. It’s the perfect example of a visual trick. For him a visual trick isn’t just showing the audience something. It’s showing them the magic occur right in front of their eyes.

Lloyd is passionate about creating visual magic. That passion was born from watching so many tricks that were identical. He wanted to create something different. He has tried hard to create tricks that were unique and unlike anything else out there. There is a big bone of contention between magicians about whether we are trying to trick people or to make them truly believe. Lloyd counts himself in the latter category. He wants to create CGI right in front of your face.

Who should we have on the podcast
Paul Harris

What do you want to tell our audience?

Don’t be afraid to perform with the audience. Don’t perform at them. Listen to them and work with them. Be authentic.

What do you want to ask our audience?

If there was one thing you’d want to see in the industry what would it be?

What was your favourite part of the episode?

Jonah liked hearing about the quantity of people submitting to Ellusionist and about the mistakes that are often made.

Tyler liked hearing how Lloyd first got into magic and how that has shaped his career.

Lloyd is looking forward to seeing if people accept the challenge of creating a new trick.

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