CREATING A MEGA STUNT
T
he vanishing of a national monument, escaping from a locked box in a river, predicting newspaper headlines and being buried alive are all mega stunts that several successful magicians around the world have staged and benefited from. These mega stunts managed to capture the imagination and interest of the public, media and industry, resulting in media buzz and publicity.I use the term mega stunt to describe any large scale magic effect or escape stunt. It can also be used to describe some kind of physical endurance stunt since the likes of David Blaine and Criss Angel have established such feats as part of the modern day magician’s repertoire.
In the past half a decade, my partner, Ning, & myself have staged ten mega stunts in Asia. Each of our stunts have garnered quantifiable media coverage and I suspect (hope may be a better word) many readers know our names be-cause of some of our mega stunts. Our stunts
have ranged from original mega-scale illusions, innovative mentalism acts and escapes.
In this article, I hope to share some of our experi-ence in creating successful mega stunts.
There are a couple of things you need to be aware of before embarking on staging a mega stunt.
First, you must understand the objectives of staging the stunt. In most cases, the purpose of a mega stunt is to create publicity and garner media coverage, that in turn leads to brand building. If you are lucky, you can even get paid for your efforts.
Next, you need to have the technical expertise and expe-rience to stage a mega stunt well and most importantly, safely. The mega stunt as a project is quite a big undertak-ing and besides the technical aspects of the stunt you are doing, you need to understand and be able to manage the event logistics which encompasses the staging, audio, visual, lighting, security, licensing, permits, crowd control, media management and other event related components that have nothing got to do with magic. It is impossible for you to do this alone and you will need a team to work with you. The average size of the production team for our stunts is around 20 - 25 people each time. If you think you are ready to stage a mega stunt, the next most important step is to actually create the stunt. Here are three hallmarks of a successful mega stunt:
1
WOW FACTORThis may seem obvious but the stunt must have a wow factor that appeals to the general public and media, not just to magicians. For example, being able to back palm two decks of cards may seem like a big “wow”to magicians but is unlikely to evoke the same response from laymen.
The wow factor can be created by doing something so impossible that it baffles the mind, using an iconic loca-tion or person or item, be incredulously dangerous or just massive in scale.
David Copperfield’s “Walking through the Great Wall of China” and “Vanishing the Statue of Liberty” had the wow factor due to the size and significance of the iconic objects used. While not a visual illusion, predicting the national lottery has a wow factor because it appeals to the greed of humans and due to the implications of having the ability to predict the lottery.
We managed to create a wow factor with our “The Mind Heist” stunt, which saw us set a world magic record of reading 100 minds in 60 minutes, due to the large number of people participating in the stunt. It was also staged as a world record attempt with officials adjudicating the stunt which made it even more intriguing.
Any stunt that is suspended high above the ground is generally quite a spectacle as it scales the effect upwards over a great height.
2
NEVER BEEN DONE BEFOREThis is the biggest selling point for a large number of stunts. The value to sponsors, clients, media and your own branding is to attempt something that has never been done before.
As all artistes know, nothing is 100% original and everything new is the old reinvented. So “never been done before” is a term that has to be contextualized to have value.
It could be a “never been done before” stunt in your country or city. Or you could be the youngest or oldest person to attempt the stunt. For example, performing the Houdini Water Torture Cell is not something that has not been done before, but if it is with a tankful of piranhas or it is performed at the top of the tallest skyscraper in the world, it would be “new”.
The key is to find a stunt and a context to make your mega stunt unique in the world. David Blaine drew inspiration for his buried alive stunt from Houdini but what made his
41
version new was the fact that he was underground for a week in a see-through coffin and people could stop by and visit him.
All our mega stunts have some element of “newness”. In
“The Impossible Teleportation”, it was the world’s first real time teleportation of a person from the street to a 50-storey skyscraper rooftop, performed completely surrounded in front of over 9000 people.
In our national lottery prediction, the “new” element was the fact that we claimed we had an actual bought lottery ticket sealed in with our printed prediction. While the lot-tery prediction is by no means original with us, no one had a genuine lottery ticket sealed in with the prediction before.
3
NEWSWORTHINESSAs most stunts are staged for publicity and media coverage, the nature of the stunt must be news-worthy. While a stunt that has “never been done before” can be a newsworthy point, it may not necessarily be enough for media to be interested. For example, you may be the first person in the world to escape from 500 ft of chain and 100 padlocks, but the media might not find this newsworthy enough to cover. Again, the key is to contextualize the stunt to make it newsworthy.
The classic sawing in half illusion is almost cliched and one would never think it could be a mega stunt that would be of interest to the media. But what if, the person you were sawing in half is the President of your country and you were performing it on your national or independence day at city
hall? I guarantee that if you were able to do this, you would make every news outlet in your country. It is the person, event and venue that gives the stunt context and makes it newsworthy.
Read PR books on how to develop angles that media likes and look out for. There are some tricks and tips to ensure your stunt is contextualized in the right direction and is designed to interest the media.
In the case of Ning’s latest “Extreme Inversion” stunt (which you can read on page), no female (to our knowledge and research) had ever performed an inverted escape from TWO straight jackets high above the ground from a burn-ing rope. So, there were a combination of three factors that made it newsworthy. One, Ning being a female. Two, her escaping from two jackets, which is uncommon. And three, it is a dangerous escape high above the ground. The media loves the angle of the “underdog”, “unlikely hero” or in this case, the non-traditional women-empowering babe putting her life at risk attempting a typically male-oriented dangerous stunt.
Plan your mega stunt with these three elements in mind and you might just make news headlines that is worth tens of thousands of dollars in PR value! Best of luck and most importantly, be safe!