Ed Sumner
15 Years Experience
Staffordshire, UK
Male, 28
I perform close up magic and stand up magic. I also run a children's magic company called Ready Steady Magic. You can find out more about me on YouTube! =P
As a professional magician and Member of the Magic Circle, I work hard to create incredible events.
Feel free to ask me whatever you wish and let me reveal the secrets of what I do (but not those secrets!)
There are lots. If you ...I mean your friend, goes to the local library, then there will probably be at least one general magic book with card tricks, and little tricks for parties, just like you asked for. The DDC number is 793.8 - Did I say magicians were all big geeks! They are usually with indoor games but if they can’t find any, ask the librarians and they’ll help.
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Well that is a great question too. Stealing other magicians’ tricks and routines is a big problem in magic. The main problem is that when I create something, I’ve put part of my personality into the routine. I believe that art is a way that we connect with people, a way to reach out to others and say, ‘This is me, I was here!’ Just ripping someone off is lazy, but more than that it shows in their performances. It doesn’t seem believable. Magic has to be unbelievable, but you have to be able to believe that it’s unbelievable. Confusing, right? Of course some magicians release their routines to other magicians. That’s fine, but when I use commercially available routines, I still change the scripting to fit my own style and what I want to say. In short, no-one in the world performs the magic I do. If you want to see the magic of Ed Sumner, you need to hire Ed Sumner. There is little that can be done to stop someone from stealing your words, your jokes or your script. Ideas can’t be copyrighted, and they just had the same idea as you, yeh right!? All they have to do is watch you perform it once, and write it down. Like I said though, it shouldn’t be much use to them, and thinking up something for themselves would serve them much better. To overcome this, magicians should keep their secrets more secret. Magicians freely share effects with each other, but maybe we shouldn’t share information so easily. Maybe when another magicians asks for a method, we should just say, ‘No I’m not showing you.’ That’s difficult, because it seems rude. Also we have an accepting stance towards it. In stand up comedy, stealing a joke is a huge faux pas, but in magic we just seem to ignore it. Finally some illusions can be patented, which in theory protect people from making and selling them, but there are still people who will try to rip them off. These people don’t care about the art of magic. They just care about themselves. For me the best way for me to preserve my own magic is to keep it only for my non-magician audiences. There are some things I share with magician friends, some things which I plan to release to other magicians too. However my A grade material is exclusively for the eyes (and ears) of the people who pay me.
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What do you mean by a typical party or event? There are a lot of variables including type of magic, distance to the venue, number of guests, am I performing in one block or am I waiting in around? Close up magic is usually three times what I charge for children’s magic. My prices are fair, but are not the cheapest or most expensive. I believe I provide a quality experience and a professional service. My clients are paying for that and for my experience. I believe it's better to pay a little more and get exactly what you want than to pay less but receive poor value, and in this case a poor magician who may not know what they are doing. I do offer discounts, if I’m booked for longer, so for example if you book me for three hours, then my price is closer to what you would pay for children’s show. Saying all that there there are a lot of popular extras which I can add on. These increase the price. In short, it’s complicated.
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That’s a difficult question to answer because I know a lot of the methods now, that even if I don’t know exactly how it works, I could figure out how it may work, or even how I would do it. Also, some magic fools me in the moment, but then I can go back and work it out later, so I guess that doesn’t fit your criteria either. If I think back to when I first started magic and the first time I saw a professional close up magician. That had me up all night thinking about how it was done and that felt like real magic. I think that to create a moment of real magic, the effect has to have meaning to it. There is a trick David Blaine did where he picked a drinks can from a bin and restored it. That makes sense, ‘Im thirsty, I want a drink, I’ll restore this one.’ It’s closer to what a real magician might do, rather than a card trick for example. In reality, magicians use props such as cards and coins to discuss a theme and to entertain, and some people say that magicians just create the illusion of the impossible. For me, I don’t want people to experience an illusion, I want them to believe they have seen something impossible, both in terms of what they physically see, but also logically as discussed above. Having said all of that, I’ve heard stories of people seeing real magic in India or China and maybe it’s the environment, that they don’t expect some old guy with a beard all the way down to the floor and sitting in the street to be able to do magic, or maybe just maybe it’s something else?
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Casting Director
Are the melt-down auditions on American Idol staged?
Professor
How do you prevent cheating and plagiarism these days?
iPhone & iPad Technician
Do you think tablets are just a fad?
An interesting question, often asked by beginner magicians. There are some companies that will employ you for short periods of time from a few weeks to a few months, but usually these still require you to be self-employed, i.e. you have a regular contract with them but you invoice them for your time. Mostly they are bars or holiday resorts and they are pretty poorly paid. I work for a bar once or twice a year for a few weeks as it’s money that I can rely on and it’s good fun. I try to go on a quiet week as I can earn more from my private bookings. The second part to this answer is about children’s magicians. There are some franchise companies that will allow you to buy their franchise and use their branding.
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In short, no. There are some magicians who play to the audience that it is actually 100% real magic i.e. Uri Gellar, but whether he actually believed it himself, I doubt it. It's an interesting idea though, that I've played around with. I certainly like to think that what I do is magic and not 'just being clever' but there is a line somewhere on how much an audience will believe before it starts to sound too implausible. In magic, even the unbelievable has to be um... believable.
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I don’t work with an assistant, so it’s not something I know a great deal about. I did hear a great piece of advice about assistants and that was ‘never marry your assistant.’ If you want to create a magic act using assistants, then the first thing you might think is to use your partner or your friends, however you need to consider if you would go into business with these people if it wasn’t magic? I make money from magic, so I wouldn’t want to jeopardise that by creating an act with someone who I had a personal relationship with. If that relationship falls apart then so does the income. I know that that has happened to magicians before. My recommendation would be to team up with another professional magician to create an act, or if one can’t be found, another performing artist, an actor, a dancer, a singer, and to train them in magic. I think a non-disclosure agreement would be useful here. Certainly they wouldn’t want to to give away secrets while they were in the act, and if they left the act, I’m not sure such an agreement would even have any legal binding. Magic secrets generally aren’t the highest priority in legal courts.
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