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Juan Esteban Varela: Zero Elements Review

Two DVDs and $59 bucks. Is it gem or is it rubble? Stay tuned to find out.

Effect/Method

This is a two DVD set on magic tricks with, literally, no props. Nothing. Not a piece of paper; no pens/pencils, no coins, cards, etc. Nothing. Just you and your words and your spectators. The challenge with this kind of magic is making it play and making it tangible. For example, there are effects where a spectator thinks of a card, and you predict it in advance. How do you predict something in advance if you aren't writing things down and using props? Good question. Varela has a solution.

The methods for this material range anywhere from simple to blow-your-mind-complex. Some effects require some super heavy duty memorization of a whole bunch of stuff. Others, you'll be able to do within a few minutes of watching the effect.

One example of an effect involves three spectators. Each are "shown" an invisible deck of cards. You name the cards as you show them (i.e., here's the 4 of Diamonds, 9 of Spades, 6 of Hearts, etc., etc.) and ask them to think of one. Using the Karrell Fox cross index principle (I think that's what it's called), you can reveal the cards they're thinking of. This requires some heavy duty memorization of a bunch of cards in a specific order as well as memorizing Juan Tamariz's Mnemonica deck (or another stacked deck).

If you're going to do this type of magic, you're going to have to put in some heavy duty effort. That's not a complaint. I'm just letting you know what you're in for.

Ad Copy Integrity

The ad copy is 100% dead on. It is exactly what it says it is and isn't. There really are no props. If you take the time to master this stuff, you really will have magic you can literally do anywhere, anytime including a nudist colony.

Product Quality

Here's where we run into some issues. The DVD is well shot, lit, mic'd, etc. However, the menu was a pain in the butt to navigate. Most of the menu items have sub menus with multiple items, some of which have more sub menus with more multiple items. Most of these don't have a "Play All" button making watching the DVD annoying because every few minutes you have to go back to the menu and click on a new item.

That aside, it's the teaching that's the hardest part to get through. Let me start by saying that these techniques, methods, concepts, etc. are solid and legitimate. However, due to the extremely complex nature of the methods, they are very difficult to explain. This is further complicated by the fact that it's spoken in Spanish by Varela with an English translation dubbed over. The person doing the voice over has a think accent and often mispronounces words which causes confusion quite a bit.

Having the words misunderstood is one thing, but due to the nature of the methods taught, it can be a HUGE problem in this case. Some of the explanations were extremely complicated, and I absolutely had no clue what the heck he was saying. Included with the DVD is a handful of PDFs, totally 4 pages. They are charts and graphs and images that you'll have to 100% memorize to do these effects. In some cases they did help clarify the video instruction.

However, in other cases, it made it more confusing. In one case the PDF had different information than the video, and I could not figure out to use the method. Further, some of the effects only work in the Spanish language. He includes them, however, to teach the concept/principle that makes them work. I can sort of see this as a little bit helpful. It can be used as inspiration to apply the concepts.

The first DVD shows a handful of effects along with the basic principles and the methods for doing them. The second DVD has several theory sections talking about how the different ideas work, psychologically. There was also a bunch of other concepts and principles discussed and tips and ideas on how to apply all of this stuff.

A lot of that was very hard to watch/listen to due to the language barrier and lost in translation moments. Speaking of translation, there is a common problem I'm seeing in a lot of these voice over DVDs these days. That is, when they have spectators come up to help, the voice over guy plays the part of both the spectator and the magician. The problem with this is you cannot tell who he's speaking for, the magician or the audience member. Further, in this particular DVD, there was an effect with three volunteers on stage, and he did the voice for all three.

They need to get another person in there so that there is a clear voice change so that you'll know who's talking. As mentioned, many of the instructions were confusing. In many cases, however, after reading the chart, re-watching the chapter in the DVD again, and thinking through it, and figuring out where the translation went wrong, and figuring out that they highlighted the wrong thing on the screen during the explanation, I was able to figure out what was being taught.

There was at least one effect that wasn't as sure-fire as the others, and there's a real chance that you could "miss" on the revelation. There was no out taught for this, or if there was, I didn't see it.

Final Thoughts

I could go on, but the gist is this: you can learn the stuff on here, but it will be a long and arduous journey just to get through the instructions. That doesn't include any effort required to memorize all the stuff you need to memorize. If the instructions were better, I'd have no problem giving this 4 or 4.5 stars even with the memorization required. It's a hard method, but a legitimate one. Just because something is difficult doesn't mean that it should get a bad rating. However, the teaching experience made this very hard to give a solid rating.

On the one hand, the concepts are extremely powerful and useful if you master them. I'm good with that, even the level of difficulty of memorizing everything. On the other hand, however, what good are these extremely powerful concepts if you don't understand how to use them because the teaching is too complex to understand. Even if you had a perfect photographic memory, that's useless if you don't understand (due to the language barrier and other aforementioned problems) how to apply the stuff you memorize.

I imagine that if Spanish were my native tongue, I might give this 4 ish or so stars, so if you speak and understand Spanish fluently, and you like the idea of this concept (100% anytime, anywhere, even naked, prop-less magic), then this DVD might be for you. If, however, you speak English (or any other language, for that matter), then . . .

Final Verdict:
2.5 Stars with a Stone Status of Grubble.