Incredible week. I was asked by FWD, a pan Asian insurer to create a custom iPad magic show for their HUGE employee event with 6000 plus people in attendance and my performance would be live translated into 7 different languages! I needed to create bespoke magic and write a script that highlighted brand values, showcase the new logo in a magical way and include as much of their brand colour (orange) as possible. I had one week to produce a show for the biggest audiences I’d ever perform for!
I set about it like I always do, generating a huge list of possible routines that would be incredibly strong magically and had scripting possibilities to hit the branding points. Now, when you are creating brand new magic from scratch in a week you can’t know for sure whether these initial ideas will work or not. They may work, given enough time but time was time very short supply so somethings fell by the wayside.
Next step is to bring in the client and get them excited about these possible routines. It’s hard in words alone to describe the germ of an idea so wherever possible I’d share YouTube links to similar things or produce quick test videos to show an approximation of what it would look like. In discussion with the client, the act was finalised.
The next part is hand making producing physical props, buying stuff online and producing custom animations and graphics for the routines in the show. My client is based in Hong Kong, the animation guy is in Bangladesh and there is a nationwide lockdown in the UK so time difference and shops not being open, made this incredibly difficult.
When the routines started to come together the next stage is drafting the script to highlight the brand values the client wanted to showcase. For this, I listen to the client on what they’d like, watch their promotional video and research on their website. All of this helped to give me key phrases that can be fitted to the magic routines.
This all brought me to Saturday with the performance planned for the early hours of Tuesday morning. Huge amount of rehearsal over the weekend, script rewrites, fixing props and a technical rehearsal with the client on Monday morning. Didn’t get much sleep on Monday night as still fine tuning the presentation and then up at 2am (!) for the show at 4.30am.
The actual flew by and I had a bunch of fun. All the magic I created went perfectly and I was delighted with the results. Such hard work but it was all worthwhile, so very proud of the final results and the client loved it.
Thanks so much Noel – it was truly magical, and we had a lot of positive feedback.
Appreciate the effort you put into the script to make it truly FWD-branded, and I hope we can work together again soon!!
Gavin Lai, Brand & Marketing, FWD Group
If you’d like me to create an incredible custom magic show for your event, either virtually or live, please contact me and let me magically showcase your brand.
