Random I-Tunes Song of The Moment: Behind These Hazel Eyes by Kelly Clarkson

Here I am once again reviewing an effect by Dani DaOrtiz. Overall I'm a big fan of his, but for us English speaking folk it can be a bit hard to watch with the Vernet translator talking over Mr. D. Further, Vernet seems to be a bit overpriced in their products. Their production quality is usually not the greatest. I've seen plenty of other products that have much greater production quality for half the price, and you get more stuff. Let's break it down.

• Product Quality
• Effect
• Method
• Ad Copy Integrity

Product Quality

For $39 bucks you get a DVD and . . .  essentially a one way force deck. It's Bicycle brand, and top quality as you would expect. The DVD itself teaches two effects and contains an interview segment along with the performance of an effect that is not taught.

The DVD is in Spanish. However, you are offered the option to listen to the voice over Vernet guy translate for you. The problem with this is that he does the translation for all of the spectators and Dani DaOrtiz which makes it very unclear what's going on. There is no tone, no pausing, no inflection, no personality to the translation and during the technical descriptions and the interview, the translator goes back and forth between DaOrtiz and another guy on the screen. It sounds like one huge long run-on sentence that has no pausing, no stopping, and you don't know which person is "talking." It's very hard to follow.

Effect

The main effect is a spelling trick. That's a bit of an understatement because there is a lot of magic going on in this routine. Three cards are chosen. Two are spelled to. The third one, the spectator makes up any card name. That made up card is spelled (let's say Queen of Hearts). The Queen of Hearts is spelled to and at the end of the spelling is the third selection. Then the kicker: all of the cards (including the three selections) change into the made up card, Queen of Hearts.

If you're looking for some further umph to add to a spelling routine, there's a lot here that could be a closer for your act. The second effect is a variation of a L'Homme Masque effect. Basically the cards are riffled, and the spectator spots a card and remembers one. The magician names the card, then goes on to prove that the card the spectator saw was never in the deck.

Finally there is a third routine that is shown, but not taught. However, most of the material is related to the above two effects, and was likely placed there to show you how to apply what you learned in various other effects.

Method

The method for this is pretty simple. It requires some mid-level card handling that'll take some practice, but nothing too tough. The deck does a lot of the work for you. Keep in mind that the Spanish names for playing cards spell with a different amount of letters than their English counterparts. This makes learning the effect a little trickier. They provide a chart that shows you how to change the set up to match for your language, but the chart made no sense to me. So instead, I watched the explanation and just fiddled with the cards to get them set up correctly.

Even then, it was a bit tricky because the voice-over guy was translating the Spanish to English, but he would then attempt to "translate" the numbers correctly. In other words, let's take the number 9. In Spanish, the word for 9 is nueve. He would translate that to "9" as in deal "9" cards. But then he would say "in Spanish." Yes he would say . . . "deal 9 cards . . . that's nine in Spanish." The reality is that the English version might require 12 cards instead of 9 due to the number of letters required to spell the name of the card.

Trust me. It was very confusing. Further, he rushed through the moves at times and it wasn't quite clear (at times) where exactly the cards ended up after certain parts of the routine. It would have been better to have a few more "position checks" throughout the explanation.

The second effect has a much simpler method and is very easy to learn from the explanation. However, both the second and first effect heavily rely on some psychological procedures that'll take some work on your part, and it's difficult to grasp the details of this due to the voice-over-ness. There's a lot of stuff going on that you're saying, doing and manipulating that gets the spectator's down the path you want. Frankly, this is the hardest part of the method and will be difficult for some to pull off. DaOrtiz is a crazy "all over the place" performer which makes much of the required skills easy for him. A less animated performer who's a bit more formal may have some difficulty pulling off some of the stuff needed.

Ad Copy Integrity

The ad copy is very honest. However, I have no idea what this phrase from the fourth bullet point means: "Only this effect plays the entire DVD." Other than that, I have no complaints about the ad copy. In fact, if anything, they undersold the effect. Further, the DVD trailer doesn't even show the effect or even its potential. Based on the DVD trailer I wouldn't even be interested in the product at all. Which is unfortunate because it is a solid effect.

Final Thoughts

The price is too high. The production quality is low. The teaching is rough. The method is solid but parts of it border on "too bold." By "too bold" I mean that the magician has to be bold in his speaking and handling of the spectators. He has to be assertive. There are quite a few good points and concepts covered in the interview segment if you can get past the voice-over challenges mentioned.

If you like the effect and are willing to put in the time, you'll probably be reasonable happy with your purchase. It'll take some effort to watch the DVD and a bit more effort to learn from it. If you happen to perform in Spanish then most of the negative I've mentioned can be completely overlooked. According to the DVD, pretty much any language can be adapted to fit the routine. I'll assume that's true with any language. However if any of your playing cards spell with more than 15 or so letters, you may run into issues with the method.

Final Verdict:
3 Stars with a Stone Status of gem (with a little g).