Abracadabra! Fun Magic Tricks for Kids is out on 21st June so we caught up with Ken, Kristen and Colette Kelly who prove that family can achieve great things if they work together for a common goal.
Abracadabra! Fun Magic Tricks for Kids
What can readers expect from your new book?
Abracadabra Fun Magic Tricks for kids is packed with 30 amazing magic tricks that you can make and do.
The illusions within the book are not just silly tricks for kids, they are routines I have performed as a working magician. You will be learning magic tricks that will astonish your audience and, with a little practice, you will look like a superstar magician.
All the magic tricks come with step by step instructions on how to make and do the magic with nice photographs to make learning easy. Every trick has its own video that you can watch if you have the internet. Either go to the web address next to the trick or use the QR code with a smart phone and you will be taken to a performance and explanation video for each trick.
Why do you think magic has gained popularity again more recently, especially on TV?
A conjurer who is now known as Dedi performed magic in ancient Egypt in 2700BC. Supposedly- he magically took the head off a chicken and put it on a live goose.
Magic has captured the imaginations of people ever since with greats like Harry Houdini who gained world fame in the 1900's. Magic was always a popular feature of the vaudeville stage and then along came television.
Television magic has always been popular; I remember watching the David Copperfield magic show when I was just a boy. David Nixon was the UK's first television "series" magician followed by Tommy Cooper, Paul Daniels and Wayne Dobson. The shows were expensive to produce because of elaborate sets and the camera technology meant that everything had to be studio shot.
Technology improved and cameras became portable which allowed TV magic to go to the streets. Street magic is as old as magic itself with early records showing the cups and balls trick performed in the streets of Rome back in 300AD. I think TV technology finally caught up with magic rather than magic caught up with TV.
Today's television magic is as much about the audience and their reaction as it is about the trick itself. This brings a whole new dimension to the show because it keys into empathy. The TV Magicians of today like Dynamo or Penn and Teller have great talent combined with fantastic production and it shows magic at its best.
What advice do you have for families who want to get together and write a book?
Do it.
Doing anything together as a family is just awesome. I think that modern life has made us very isolated even within our own families. A family can all be sitting together in the same room without actually being together. Maybe one is reading a book, one on Facebook on their phone, another listening to a song via headphones and another watching a movie on a tablet. Anything that gets the family talking, working together and focusing on a common goal is worth doing. Abracadabra was written for the whole family to enjoy together. Parents are encouraged to help their kids make the tricks and then the child gets to practice and perform for everyone. This is real time spent together away from tech toys that rob us of what is important. If you have an idea for a book then go for it. It's a great way to spend time together. It doesn't matter if the book gets published or not, it's more important that you get to spend quality time with the ones you love.
What is your fondest memory from putting the book together?
The best part for me was having the photographs taken. The book has hundreds of photographs as I wanted the tricks to be easy to understand. I learn best from looking at pictures so I asked Colette if she would photograph Kristen and I doing the magic and the making.
We all got prepared but when we started shooting Kristen and I couldn't stop laughing. The more serious the pose, the more we would crack up. Colette pretended to be cross and kept telling us to behave but she ended up laughing too. It ended up taking an extra day to photograph the tricks but it was worth it. If you look in the book you can actually see us giggling in some of the pictures. Great memories for us all.
What is your favourite magic trick to perform and why?
My favourite magic is the one that the audience member likes most and that varies from person to person. Let me share one of the biggest secrets of magic with you.
When you see magic and you don't know how it works it fills you with wonder and excitement. When you start learning how to do magic it can sometimes be a bit of a let-down when you see how a trick is done. A magic trick that looked so amazing can suddenly become quite obvious when you know the secret. Many people think that magic is about learning secrets. It's not. Anyone can learn secrets, that's easy. The true secret of magic is being able to perform the magic trick for someone else. The true secret of magic is creating that wonder and amazement in others. For magic to be magic it needs someone to perform it and that's why I wrote the book.
Ken, you got your first magic kit from your grandmother at a young age, so can you tell us a little bit more about this moment?
I got a magic set when I was 6 years old. I remember showing my Grandmother a trick that I had learned from the set and she was totally amazed, she wanted to know how I did it.
I didn't tell because the first rule of magic is that a magician never reveals their secrets to the audience.
I remember feeling rather special about that first trick because I realised that I could do something that other people couldn't.
I decided right there and then that I wanted to learn more magic and I went to my local library to get some magic books.
Why has magic been such a special part of your life for so long? How does it make you feel when you're performing it?
The more I learned about magic the more my love for magic grew and the more I performed. I found magic gave me confidence, I was able to stand in front of groups and speak with ease and at school everyone knew me as the magic man. I guess that's why writing this book was so important, I want to share that wonder with others who want to learn.
Kristen, you won Warrington's Got Talent for your magic show at age six, so please tell us about your performance.
I asked my dad to teach me a few tricks that I could do for our local talent show because I just wanted to have the experience of taking part. I did my first performance and to my surprise they put me through to the next round. I made it right through all the heats to the finals that were held on a massive stage at the Parr Hall in Warrington to a crowded audience of hundreds.
The tricks I did were all very visual and not to complicated which allowed me to focus on the performance element. When I won first place I couldn't believe it. It was a wonderful experience that led on to me being asked to do a number of performances.
Colette- what were you looking for from the pictures? How long did it take you to get the perfect shot?
There was a twofold aim with the pictures. There are the instructional images that show how the tricks are made and then done. My aim with these pictures was to make it as easy and clear as possible for the reader to follow along. Getting these shots was fairly easy and I generally got what I was looking for within one or two shots. There are even some tricks where I was the hand model! I mounted the camera on a tripod and "posed" for the different shots myself…
The second part was the 'performance' or intro picture for each trick. These were more difficult to get as it involved both Kenneth or Kristen (and sometimes both of them) acting for the picture. The aim was to capture the chemistry between them or their personalities in these images that adds that special connection with the reader. The difficulty was in getting them to stop being silly and pulling funny faces! But we got there in the end, sometimes after 10 shots!
What is next for you all?
Firstly, we are all dead excited to see how the book does when it launches. If anyone does get a copy, please leave us an Amazon review, we really want to know what you think and we will read them together as a family.
We have some new magic videos planned for the magictricksforkids.org website that Kristen and I look forward to shooting over the summer holidays. We will continue to bring joy and smiles to children in our local area through our family kids entertainment site magic4children.co.uk.
Most importantly, we will continue to seek out stuff that we can all enjoy together because family is the real magic here.