Cellular Selection

The simplest of card tricks involving a cell phone - made extremely magical.



/// Warning! Try this at your own risk! Bringing a magnet near your electronics device may cause permanent damage. ///

You may find yourself reading through the following presentation and take it as just a simple idea - and it is! It is a simple idea combined with an excellent presentation to take what may have been an average trick up to a knockout worker effect.

Pre-Work:

Using your cellphone’s camera, take a picture of what will become your force card, for the most basic revelation, set the picture as your phone’s background.

Don’t have a camera phone or looking for alternate methods to reveal the force card, try these:

Go into your phone’s address book and enter your cellphone’s number as an entry. Title it something like, “MagiComputer”, “34^H#84! (random digits), ‘10110100001010′ (random binary code), or “The Magician”. Text yourself the name of the playing card (or send yourself the picture). When you receive the message, don’t open it as it will be revealed later that you’ve received ‘1 New Message from _________”. The random digits, ‘MagiComputer’ and binary code go along with the presentation nicely.

The majority of cellphones allow the owner to change the ‘Welcome Message’ to what ever they want it to say. Change it from, say “____’s Phone” to the name of the force card; that way, when you turn the phone on…

Other ideas include playing around with your voice mail, placing a mini (or singly folded regular) version of the force card inside your (flip) phone or inside your phone’s battery compartment. These can work in a pinch, but don’t work as well with the presentation.

Drop the phone in your back right pocket (if right handed or vice versa if you’re left handed). The phone should be upside down with its back to your back.

Place a deck into your right front pocket, knowing where your force card is.

If you have a PK ring, there’s a cool little add on you can perform but is not necessary.

All right, let’s do it:

Oh sure, I’d love to show you something glance at your watch and act slightly rushed. But we’re gonna have to go fast. You are already reaching for your deck of cards. If you do not have a watch (I never do) it adds a bit of humor to the routine when you look down to your bare wrist. Note: if you are right handed, the fake watch is on the left arm (and vice versa).

Your force card is somewhere in the deck, be it on top, bottom, somewhere in the middle; maybe you’re using a force deck. Either way, the card is forced and, rather then having the card removed, it is simply out jogged from the deck which is squared up and shown to all. Through several years of performing this, I’ve realized that this really cuts down on the jerk factor (spectator’s denying or forgetting a card’s identity). Place the deck with the face down card sticking out on a table, the ground, or somebody’s hand.



One more interesting point on the force is something I learned from watching Tommy Wonder’s, ‘The Tamed Card’. Because of the sense of immediacy built into the routine, it is quite easy to perform a classic force under these conditions.

Right, well you’ve all seen it now, and glance at you [invisible] watch again and quickly glance at the sky. Bring your eyes back to your watch arm and then to your audience (as fast as counting ‘1, 2, 3, 4′) while saying In a few moments, bring your right hand to shoulder height and extend your index finger upwards, back of the hand is facing the audience. Continue this action by pointing higher with your left finger and trace an arc over head; simultaneously, your right hand lowers to your side, slips into your back pocket, and retrieves the phone, bringing it back to the pictured position, by your side.



All this is done while saying, A satellite will fly directly over head of us. (You are tracing the Arc in the sky) I managed to write a special computer program which, once received by the satellite, lower your left hand to your side and look at your audience. …can analyze a person’s thoughts and beam the message back to me. So, I need you to concentrate because in just a moment.

Reach over with your right hand and point at your invisible watch as you say the word ‘moment’the satellite rotate your left arm 180 degrees and use your right arm to point up slightly, about chest level - being careful to not expose the cellphone. Will pick up on your thoughts and send them back to me right, here.

As you say the word ‘here’, produce the phone on your left hand by simply bringing the right hand it over, waving, and depositing the phone on the left hand. Because of all the motion of the two hands in the previous few seconds, it suggests that nothing was originally in the hands.



I use a ‘waving sequence’ that sort of mimics the Roy Benson Move used in card manipulation sequences. It’s nothing complicated or fancy, but it feels and appears more magical than just slapping your right hand onto the left and moving it away…

At this point, you are free to reveal the card however you set it up for the revelation. Of the methods listed, I like texting the photo to myself and having it read, ‘1 New Message from MagiComputer’ - it works best with the patter. Course, if I am forced to prepare this on the fly and there is little or no cellular reception, using the background works fine too.



Having an actual miniature card somewhere on or in your phone works but requires a little addition to your patter, adding the fact that your mobile also has a miniature copier built in.

One cool tip that I use whenever I have my PK ring with me lets you show the exact moment the message seems to arrive. Before we get into it, here is the warning: I do not know what this may or may not be doing to the phone. I know not how or why it works, it just does. Furthermore, odds are it doesn’t work with all phones and may just be a quirk. Still, if you find this works for you and you decide to do this regularly, nobody accepts any responsibility should your phone break or otherwise loose some or all of it’s functionality… Unless you just happen to have some sort of insurance on your phone, and even then, nothing is for certain.

And on that lively note, lets see what all the fuss is about. I’ll explain how this works on my RAZR and leave you to experiment with your own phone. When I bring the PK ring near the upper right corner of the RAZR’s exterior LCD screen, the phone lights up, as if I just opened it or pressed a button. In performance, when the phone lights up, it looks like the message has just come down at that moment, despite the fact that no tone is heard. If you’re interested in giving this a try, break out your PK ring (or since I KNOW if you own one it’s probably permanently affixed to your finger) bust out your cell and start waving the ring over the face of the phone and see if anything happens. Keep things close, within half a cm, if not, gently rubbing the surface of the phone. Course, if your phone has no external screen of any sort, well, this was all just a waste of time.



[The area in red seems to be the sweet spot to get the screen to react to a PK ring.]

FINAL THOUGHTS

For this effect to fly, most of your practice time must be focused on coordinating your actions to your words. Things should just flow naturally, very unrobotic. Beginning to end, the whole thing lasts about a minute.

If for whatever reason you are having problems gripping the phone, perhaps it is too wide or fat, try using a Tenkai Palm.

It is not required that the pictures you take be full, high res images. In fact, my first phone’s camera was so bad I could only take pictures of the card’s index so that at least something would be legible in the revelation.

Finally, I am by no means the first, nor will I be the last to perform and create an effect that uses a cellular phone to reveal a selected card. That said, there are some fine points to this piece which I hope you’ll find give Cellular Selection it’s own special place. First of all, the presentation, it’s simple and tight; the whole routine goes down in under 60 seconds and it took years of performing this before the presentation became so concise. Secondly, I hope magicians will be able to appreciate the subtle misdirection by coordinating specific actions to words in order to perform a clean production of the phone. Finally, should you adopt it into your work, I hope the use of a PK ring to awaken a phone makes its way into other effects and routines in the future.