Bottle By Perseus Arkomanis

Hello, welcome to Real Magic Review. My name is Steve Faulkner and today we're going to be reviewing Bottle by Perseus Archimanus. Man, I knew I was gonna get it wrong. Archimanus, that was it. Sorry man, he's watching as well. I had a bit of a mental block with it and I was getting so worried about mispronouncing names that I mispronounce them all the time. Archimanus, Archimanus, that's how you say it, isn't it? Perseus, who is watching now. That's why I got it wrong basically. Okay, before we carry on with this, can you please like and subscribe, very important. If you like this, of course. If you don't, don't like and don't watch it. If you don't like it, that'd be good. And check out CardMagicCourse.com, really important. Everything's changing soon with that. It's getting a rebrand, lots of exciting things happening. CardMagicCourse.com is my online card magic course. Hundreds of videos, live sessions every week. We're doing live sessions tonight, guest lecturers and more in the next few months. So check that out, please. That's what kind of runs the whole thing. I'm gonna get on with the review and then come to the chat now, because the question I've got, Perseus, is if you can answer in a minute. I've got a clip from the instructional video, but you know the first bit, when you perform. Can I show that? You can message me privately on Facebook Messenger if you want to do that, but you know that performance bit at the beginning, obviously, before we get into the explanation. If you're not happy with the show, if that's just for people that have bought it, that's completely fine and etc. So, don't know why I said etc there. I'm a bit nervous, I think, because I haven't done one of these for two weeks. As you may see, I haven't reviewed anything. I've been performing away. I'll answer any questions about that down at the Evening of Deception down in Cheltenham. That's the show that Andy Glabwing used to organise, which was a joy and very nerve-wracking. So, I couldn't do any reviews then since I've been back. Kids are off school. I've had fake COVID. I've got fake COVID. I've got all the COVID symptoms, but not COVID. So, I'm sorry if I'm not quite on it, but I really wanted to review this. I wanted to do a live review of it, because I had a little bit of me doing this. I put it on Facebook the other day and Instagram, and it was one of those things where I saw the ad and I thought it looked amazing. Then I did it and I couldn't work. You know when you do it and once you know how it's done, you go, does it look good? And then I showed it to a couple of people and they said, no, it looks great. And then I put it on Instagram and Facebook and then a lot of magicians said it looks great. So, not necessarily how I'm doing it, but the whole thing. And that was a me doing just part of this, not the whole routine, which I'll show you now actually. And I was really glad that the response, because I think it is lovely. And Perseus is here, I'm sure he can answer questions. I haven't advertised this live one, so there'll be more people after this. So if you've got any questions, put them on the comments afterwards and I'll cover them on the comments on comments session next Thursday. I am here next Thursday and I'll answer any questions there and I'm sure Perseus would as well. So here's my little, I've got so many different clips here, I've got to get the right one. Here's my clip of it, I think it's on this one. This is just me doing the one part of this, which is disappearance, which I think is the most magical bit. I think this is beautiful. Again, not necessarily how I do it, but the idea and the thinking behind it. So it's very quick. Okay, so I'll just show you that one more time. This isn't after much practice. All right, so that's this appearance of this card. The trick is, whoa, hang on, where have we gone? There you go. My monitor scared me then, just went blank. The trick is, somebody takes a card, the card then appears that you tell a story of the bottle and Perseus has a lovely presentation around this. The card appears in the bottle and then you tip the card out of the bottle and it's a big card again. So it's a little card to a big card. I'll show you this, the whole trailer and I know some people, and I'll talk about it through it, but let's just watch the trailer now. What is your message in magic? Bottle is a search for aesthetic satisfaction. That image of that small bottle with that mini card inside has always stuck in my head as a source of mystery. I think that's a good point. I know this is quite poetic, but I think what's important about this is people know about a message in a bottle and it's something that, even though it's quite an unusual thing, a small bottle and it's not an everyday object, well obviously a bottle is, but do you know what I mean? There's so much room for metaphor and story in this, if you want to go that route, and I also think if you don't want to go that route, just to present it is fine, but it opens, that's The effect is this, a small glass bottle is introduced, the spectator selects a card, you reach out in the air, grab a small piece of imagination and slowly manifest it in the obviously empty bottle, in the form of a mini card. I think what he says there is important, it's slowly, this isn't a quick, spectators always say to me, oh the hand is quicker than the eye and all that sort of stuff, but when you do something deliberately slowly, as we all know, it's so much more magical and I think that's a really big selling point to this appearance of this card, it's slow and it comes from, you're holding that bottle so clearly, it's like it can't come from anywhere. You open the cork, tip out the card and it instantly grows to its natural size, we can hand it out as a souvenir. I'm gonna stop that there just because that shows the main part of it, I won't show the whole thing. Now I think this is really beautiful, I think it's really special and when I received this stuff from Perseus, everything's really lovely about all this, I'll just show you what you get, I'm sure it might have fallen apart actually, let me just check, it hasn't. I'm not going to expose it so don't worry, not my usual trick of exposing the instructions. So, oh my GoPro's died, hang on, never mind, I can't show the GoPro's gone, let me just see if I can get that sorted out. I'll show you it here. So, what I like about it, you get written instructions, which I really like, you get video instructions as well, produced really, really nicely, the written instructions are great, they're not too wordy, like the download, you know, really, really nice, again you can't see that well, which is a good thing, it's right there, but really nice illustrations, very clear, not over the top and the download is the same, you don't get an hour and a half, it's a 20 odd minute download, which is just enough, you get all the details of that. I'm going to go on and on and on about it, which does get a bit tiresome, and this is what you get, you get the gimmick and the rollercoaster, and I think it's okay to show this, let me know if it wasn't, Perseus, and I'll happily blur that out, but you get everything you need to do this straight away. And the slight of hand that's involved, I will say this is fairly easy, on the Orion Productions website, it says four out of five difficulty, I don't think it is, I think it makes it feel like it's really knacky. Now I am a slight of hand magician, but if you're confident with things like coin vanishes, things like that, and you have that, you're going to be able to do that, it's way easier than a coin vanish by the way, but just that kind of sensibility, that naturalness of movement, it's all kind of there, you don't have to, I didn't have to practice this a lot before doing that little clip. Now I would have to practice it a lot if I was going to go out and do the whole routine, which I have done, because the bit after that actually I would say arguably is the more difficult bit. When you show the card in the bottom and tip it out into your hand, again there's no real slight of hand there, but there's a kind of thing you have to do which is almost kind of self-working, but you've got to be confident with it, and so you've got to do that thing of repetition, and of getting really confident with the prop, which I really enjoyed by the way, it was challenging enough for me to work with it, and to just start to understand, but not so difficult that I could imagine doing it quite quickly. Angle wise, it's not really a problem, when you first learn it you'll think it's going to be, but actually it's a bit like, you know, if you're here, you're going to be fine, and once you show that bottle empty at the end, if you've done that tip out, there's a really lovely display. This routine is all about the displays, and you might be tempted to almost learn it without working on those bits of it, but the displays are the magical things, showing it there at the fingertips, and just boom, and it being there, almost like a spellbound, but a slow spellbound, and then afterwards you can tip it out, you show it, and you've got a free, it's a really lovely display, you can just show it, you don't want to gild the lily, but you can really gesture with it freely, and I think it's beautiful. Again, so magical, the way it appears, I can't see anything that wrong with it, when you see how it's made, part of you will think, oh is this going to last, repeat performances, and it does, it's built really well, it looks delicate, but actually it can take a quite a lot of hammering, because I repeated, and repeated, and repeated, I really spent pretty much a whole evening with this, just repeating that thing, just to see if it would last out, and that's obviously why I'm a bit late to the game, because I do like to get this stuff out, and really really work it in, and when certain materials in this, I've seen some products, and they're clearly not going to last, this I'm sure is, the two bottles are genuine glass bottles, which makes it better, obviously as he says, if you drop them, you will break them, so you've got to be a little bit careful in practice, I did drop mine a couple of times, and even though I was on a carpet, I had like a table with a metal thing, and so be a little bit careful, but I just love it, it's a cute trick, but some cute tricks are cute, and not magical, this is cuter than it uses small stuff, and it's going to be really endearing to some people, when you get these, people like those tricks that use small objects, that turn into big ones, there's a real kind of Alice in Wonderland feel to it, you know with the medicine bottle, I will say also every move in this is justified, you're going to have to have a bit of confidence with getting certain things in and out of play, again not difficult technically, but you've got that choreography, and every moment of this is choreography, from taking the top off, to putting in pocket, everything is justified, and I think incidentally you could do this very well with lapping, without having to do any of that, but that's again another skill, where you're going to have to work on that, but I think this is open to different interpretations, and different presentations as well, I'll just check if there's anything I've forgotten, what's that say? No, and I can't think of anything negative, I think this is really special, and a lot of people said they haven't heard of it, obviously it's not coming through the big companies, I don't know whether it'll be sold through them in the end, but I've got four things from Orion, I've also got Cyclops that I've played with, that I will review, which I think is great, the other two just look brilliant, haven't got into them yet, but I'm really excited about this stuff, and I love it, there is so much coming out now, that it gets overwhelmed, that everybody's bringing out PDFs and stuff, and some of them are great, don't get me wrong, but downloads, and so it's a really refreshing thing, a little bit like I felt with the 1914 guys, when a new people go, I've created a production company, and we're going to produce some stuff, and then you get it, and it's really good, I've just, a lot of care has gone into this, when you buy their stuff, you get an essay with each release, I think is the deal, and I think Percy's have done a really, really good job, I would without a doubt put this into my set, it's not going to play big, big, unless you've got cameras and stuff, so for parlor, a small parlor and close-up, not loads of pocket space, and I think it's really, really good, I love it, and man, that production is just utterly beautiful, and a lot of thought has gone into it, you know, when you see it, you're going to go, that's really clever, the little subtleties, and you know, he's obviously spent a long time working on this, and thank you for doing that, so just go to the comments there, someone did say by the way, that I got a bit of feedback on one of the forums, which I agree with, they said sometimes my live reviews are a little bit, I spend ages getting to review, and I talk too much, so for those of you that just want the review, without the questions, and the rambling that I'm going to do now, which I am going to do, you feel free to tell it off, but wouldn't, no, stay on, so thanks for saying hi everybody, Gileon111 from Georgia in USA, Leonard, how you doing, Ollie, I think that's you, isn't it, interesting, yeah, not seen much on this, nor have I, Martin's Circus Guild Workshop, how wet and windy it is, isn't it, I'm just down the road in Sheffield, will this be available over the weekend at Blackpool, yes, apparently so, I'm not going to Blackpool, oh, I'm so, Gary, how are you doing, how long have you got, some great, and then there's the other bits, yeah, tell me about it, I've been enjoying the Royal Roads study you have on your course, will you be adding more to it, absolutely I will, I'm gonna be totally adding, we're doing the whole book, now if you finish Royal Roads, you'll be in another book, it's been fun to study with book in hand, yeah, I will, definitely, loads of stuff coming up, Quantum Deck, I know this is going up, I will be looking at it, I haven't got it yet, and was that, yeah, cool, oh, sure, show it, okay, well I'll show, Percy's doing the whole routine now then, hopefully I've got the right thing, hello everyone and welcome to Bottle, I'm Percy Ergomanis, and this is how the effect looks like, I want you to select a card, but I want to make it a random choice, so as I riffle through the deck, I want you to stop me at any point, right, go ahead, right here, remember your card, I have something peculiar with me, it's this small little bottle, now I'm sure you've seen movies or you've read books around castaways, and this bottle is what most of the castaways would use, you know, just to send a message for people to find them, right, and that's exactly what we're gonna do, you're gonna use that little bottle so you can send a message, now imagine your card being that little message, right, I want you to imagine that you're writing this message in the air, right between us, I'm gonna grab the message, put it in the bottle, as you can see, that little jack of hearts, I'm guessing that was your message, obviously not gonna get it like this, I'm gonna make it a little bit bigger, you get to keep your message, I get to keep my bottle, there you go, beautiful, just love it, thanks for letting me show that and I hope you like that, I just think it's just great, so thank you very much, any questions, quickly, oh, Perseus says he won't be up this year's Blackpool, sorry, I misunderstood before, so, and it's, he says thank you, you're absolutely welcome, thanks for sending it to me, thank you Colin, says love your little performance, I saw the clip on Instagram, great, magic song, how you doing, right, so I'm gonna go now, thank you so much for watching, any questions, just put them on the comments when this goes afterwards, not this comments, and I'll answer them next Thursday, please check out cardmagiccourse.com, have a lovely time at Blackpool, if you're going, I'm so sad I'm not gonna be there, my partner's vulnerable and we're sort of going away afterwards, so I didn't want to, didn't want to risk that this year, but do report back, let me know what you got, let me know how it was and have just the best time, if you're not going to Blackpool, have the best time anyway, I'm trying not to cough now, have a great one, if you're on the live cardmagiccourse.com, I'm shiny aren't I, live session, I'll see you in 40 minutes and take care everybody and Percy, thank you so much for coming, see you later, bye bye.