Via Mark Frauenfelder I saw this pretty amazing magic trick by Cyril Takayama. I have absolutely no idea how it might have been done. [UPDATE: To clarify, the card trick I am referring to begins at the 7:54 mark.]
Mano Singham
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Which trick… that’s an hour long video!
If the first one, I’d assume one of them is a look-alike… still, it looked awesome!
@NL: In the linked article, the writer had set the video to begin at 7m 54s, where a card trick is performed.
Here’s my theory:
The girl writes on the card. During the shuffling process, the magician hands the marked card to an assistant who brings it outside. They have a mechanism in place to quickly put the card up on to the window from the outside. When the magician sprays the cards on the inside of the window, the outside card-placement mechanism is temporarily obscured by the spray of cards inside. It *looks* like the card that stuck to the window came from the sprayed stack, but it was actually placed separately.
That trick featured on an episode of House. Wasn’t explained, alas. But House made the point that knowing how the trick is done is better than having mystery. At least sometimes.
Pretty much what Marshall said in #3, but the target card was removed from the deck even before shuffling. You can be pretty sure of this because he let the mark shuffle. Card trick experts can do fake shuffles and perfect shuffles, but to let someone else do it is taking a risk.
The mark writes on the card. Then the magician flips the card over onto the deck and hands it to her. BUT -- he actually picked up two cards and flipped them, so that the one he handed to the mark is no longer her card. The one handed to her is inserted into the interior of the deck. That is when he removes the marked card from the top of the deck, before any real shuffling takes place.
Yeah, the first part of it is easy, it’s called a “double-lift” which is incredibly simple to do with a little practice but has a *lot* of applications. As Reginald Selkirk said, he lifts the card she wrote on with a second card underneath it, but handles them like it is just one card. So, when he flips it over, the card on top is not the marked card, and when the audience member takes the top card, the actual card she wrote on is now on top.
He is then free to pocket her actual card before handing her the deck.
Now he passes the marked card to an assistant as she shuffles who take the card out. I have no idea what system they use to put the card on the outside of the window, but they do it while the vision is obscured by him shooting the cards at the window.
Putting the card outside the window: It has to go into position fast, I have watched several times and did not see the card moving into position. On the plus side, since it is outside, no one but the magician handles the card at this stage, so it is possible to hide gimmicks. Perhaps it is tied to monofilament string of the correct length and dropped from above.
It is easy to see how her card could have been passed on to assistants, but the mechanism that put it on the windows isn’t at all obvious.
Though we must remember the video we see could have been edited -- an audience distracted by the flying cards and otherwise unexpecting would not notice something easily captured by video -- a sprung loaded acrylic arm slapping it into place in a tenth of a second for example. But the few frames that see it can easily be removed/edited from/in the video while retaining truthful images of the audiences reactions.