Random I-Tunes Song of The Moment: Invisible Kid by Metallica
Name Tag Review
One 40 minute DVD, one name tag holder (gimmick), four specially printed cards, $45 bucks and one Name Tag Review. Is it gem or is it rubble? Stay tuned to find out.
Name Tag Review: Effect
You are able to predict the out come of a free choice of either 5 ESP symbols, or 6 playing cards.
Name Tag Review: Method
The method relies on a very special gimmick that allows you to secretly make the prediction be whatever you want. You are limited to the five ESP symbols along with specific cards. The gimmick does most of the work, but is a little knacky. There are four gimmicks supplied. Two allow you to reveal ESP cards, and two allow you to reveal playing cards. For the ESP cards, one gimmick allows you to reveal the ESP cards as if you hand drew the prediction. The other gimmick allows you to reveal a printed symbol rather than an apparently hand drawn one.
With the cards, it's the same thing. One gimmick allows you to reveal what appears to be an actual card, while the other gimmick allows you to reveal an apparently written prediction of the card value and suit shape. I found that the printed ESP card reveal is the easiest gimmick to work with and that the printed playing card one is the hardest to work with. As I mentioned, the gimmick is very knacky, and will take some practice. If you're familiar with nail writers, it takes that same type of pause required to do the work. Once they reveal their choice, you have to take a moment an adjust the gimmick accordingly. It takes a fair amount of practice to do this without looking fishy.
The method is legitimate and doable, but will take a small amount of dedication and a fair amount of practice. One last note. There is a method taught for secretly switching a bunch of freely selected cards with another group of cards. It is brilliant! It was, by far, my favorite thing on the DVD. I will be using this from now on when I need to switch a bunch of cards. It requires the use of something that most card magicians already have.
Name Tag Review: Ad Copy Integrity
The ad copy is very accurate. Everything they claim is true. The ad trailer correctly, accurately and fairly represents the truth about what the effect is and what you get. One point of clarification is needed, however. The claim that the prop can be examined is true if you remove the card from inside it. You can hand out the name tag sleeve for examination as long as it's empty.
Name Tag Review: Product Quality
The special sleeve and the four prediction gimmicks are precision made and work perfectly (after you acquire the knack). The lanyard and clip are also quality material. As for the video production, that's another story. Bad lighting and bad audio abound. Also, it's all 100% in non-English audio, but it's subtitled English. This, of course, creates that awkward vertical tennis match between text and teacher (Agus Tjiu). Thus . . . rewinding is needed more than once.
The language barrier also caused one other problem. During the section where he talks about putting a photograph of yourself on the name tag, he talks about how thin the photo should be. The subtitles say that it should be no more than 120 grams. Any more than 120 grams will be too thick for the holder. I'm sure he meant something else, but we'll never know.
The only other weird thing was that the lanyard is permanently attached to the clip that attaches to the name tag holder. In the video, he shows you using the clip without the lanyard so that you can clip it on your shirt instead of wearing it around your neck. It appears that he has two clips. Mine only came with one, so if I decide to go with the "clip it on the shirt" look rather than the "around the neck" look, I'll either have to buy a clip at an office supply store or destroy my lanyard. It's not a huge deal since the clip has nothing to do with the effect. It just holds the name tag. But it just feels like something is not quite complete.
Other than that, everything you need to know about doing this effect and similar ones is found here. In the trailer, at the very end, there is a moment where he flicks the holder and the card changes. That is not taught on the DVD. However, it's pretty intuitive once you know how the gimmick works. Lastly, the one thing needed to perform the super clever card switch I mentioned earlier is a common item, but I felt that it would have been super easy to include it for the sake of completeness. It would have increased the value much more than the small cost to do so.
Name Tag Review: Final Thoughts
If you liked anything you saw in the trailer, then you'll love this. It's a very clever and well made gimmick that will last a long time. If they're smart, in the future, they'll come up with more revelation gimmicks that can be used with the name tag holder. Either way, if you don't mind putting in the time (not a ton) to get the knack, this is well worth the cost.
Final Verdict:
4 Stars with a Stone Status of Gem.
Available at your Favorite Magic Dealer. Dealer's see Murphy's Magic for details.
6 Comments
120 grams – “I’m sure he meant something else, but we’ll never know.”
This is related to ordering your business cards on 80-pound stock, even though a business card should ideally weigh somewhat less than 80 pounds. Paper has a “basis weight” that is the weight of 500 uncut sheets. 500 is chosen because it completely isn’t arbitrary. But, this is insufficiently confusing, so, for example, Bond Paper is cut from 17×22 basis sheets while Cover Stock is cut from 20×26 basis sheets. As a result, the SAME labeled weight for two different types of paper will mean DIFFERENT thicknesses of paper. That is, paper types cut from bigger basis sheets get an artificially inflated weight relative to paper types cut from smaller basis sheets. This system is used because it’s such a logical standard to adopt. The size of the basis sheets for different types of paper seems to be a tightly held industrial secret, to prevent people like you and me from understanding all this.
ts/dr (too stupid / didn’t read): You want to know the thickness of paper, but you can’t calculate the thickness of the paper from the given weight unless you know the secret size of larger basis sheets that the end product was cut from.
A much better way to describe the thickness of the paper would be to tell you the weight of the paper PER SQUARE INCH or PER SQUARE FOOT. (Of course the best way to describe the thickness would be to just, you know, TELL YOU THE FRIGGIN’ THICKNESS, but that would be too easy.) Since telling you the thickness would be a serious violation of the too-easy rule, we’ll have to accept weight per area as second best. At least this makes far, far more sense than using basis weight. Weight per unit area is used in Asia, where people understand math.
This brings us to “grammage.” This is the weight in grams of one square meter of the paper. But instead of labeling 24-pound printer paper as “90.3 grams/square meter” with the proper unit, they’ll just say it’s “90.3 grams.” The incorrect unit is used just to irk the hell out of your old junior-high science teacher.
Let’s assume that you don’t mind confusing weight with area density so that we can continue. Even the Asians are forced to comply with this, so when Mr.Tjiu recommends 120 gram paper maximum, he actually means a paper weighing no more than 120 grams per square meter.
The paper-paper.com/weight.html web page has a handy (for low values of handy) chart allowing us to convert grammage (the standard in countries that use what Dave Barry called “the metric, or communist, system of measurement”) to the pound-weight-basis-sheet system used by whatever American or English idiot invented it, and by those of us victimized by it. This chart also gives, shockingly, the ACTUAL THICKNESSES OF PAPERS, which was all we wanted to begin with. But the paper industry, just to be difficult knuckleheads, insists that thicknesses have to be in “points” (.001 inches), instead of something simple that you actually learned in school, like millimeters. (Using the zero-dimensional “point” to refer to one-dimensional thickness is done just to irk the hell out of your junior-high geometry teacher.)
ts/dr: Consulting the chart, don’t use paper thicker than about 6.1 point or .155 millimeters.
But, you obnoxiously whine, my local office-supply store stupidly labels their paper with weights, not points. So, what’s the maximum WEIGHT I should buy for this trick? Well, as we have learned, for low values of learning, this question is unanswerable – unless you also know the type of paper and thus the secret size of the basis sheet it was cut from. Again consulting the chart, do not use more than 32-pound Bond Ledger paper or more than 45-pound Cover Stock, which is about equally thick.
Because 32 = 45.
Q.E.D., or something.
Now, isn’t it particularly apt that 500 sheets of paper gets you a “ream”?
I cannot believe that I actually just had to use a good percentage of my math and physics degrees just to understand the thickness of a %@$&ing sheet of paper.
@Emory – Thanks for the post brother. Now I know more about paper than I ever wanted to know. 🙂
Thanks for clarifying(?) that.
Good thing I have a caliper.
Okay . . . I’ll bite . . . why is it a good thing you have a caliper? 🙂
My comment should have been under Emory’s comment as a reply.
Calipers are used to do very precise measurements. Since you don’t want to use paper thicker than about 6.1 point or .155 millimeters, you would use a caliper to measure the paper thickness.
@Doug – Thanks for the clarity. I know what calipers are. I was a machinist for a while back in the day. I just wasn’t finding the connection. Often, by the time I read the comments, I’ve already posted 10 other reviews and have forgotten what was going on with the video I’m commenting on. 🙂