A Single Point of Failure
By Shane

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Okay, so there I was, notepad in front of me, working on a new effect for Visions. I had the basic concept in mind -- a specific type of card revelation -- but for the life of me I couldn't seem to pull everything together. At all. No matter what I tried, no matter the thoughts popping into my little brain, something was just, well, for lack of a better word, missing.

It wasn't that I was missing the presentation I wanted to show. It wasn't that the methodology wasn't there. The technology behind the routine, the moves and sleights weren't mysteriously absent. In fact, everything surely seemed to be there, in place, waiting to be wrapped up in a nice little framework and ready to be put forth to the nearest spectators.

But it just felt wrong. Empty, almost.

Then it hit me: I'm missing the single point of failure within the effect.

Oops. I said the f-word. Hang in there; I promise not to mention more than a few more times.

As performers, we want to create good effects. "Good" is extremely subjective, but generally speaking we talk about "good" effects, we're talking in terms of the impact it has on the audience that is either lucky enough to witness a magical wonderment or unfortunate enough to have a boring piece of drivel thrown into their faces. The problem, more often than not, is cutting to the basics of an effect and making the determination that an effect is good or not. In my own mind, the yardstick for helping me make that determination is the single point of failure.

Shane's Theorem: Every good effect has a single point of failure, a single aspect or instant, where, if the audience believes what they have seen, the rest of the effect has no solution to it's workings and becomes impossible.

Let's take a look at a couple of effects and see how this works. Let's start with the famous Cigarette Through Coin. Now, to the spectator this is about as straightforward as you're going to get. And the effect is a good one, a classic. It also has a single point of failure: the coin switch. If the audience believes there is no coin switch, more accurately never suspects the swtich took place, then there is no explanation for the remainder of the effect.

The coin matrix is another classic, and also possesses a single point of failure, even though there's a great deal of chicanery going on. Yes, each coin is clipped against a card and hidden when it "travels", but the single point of failure is the initial steal of a coin. If the audience believes that a coin is truly under each card before the first teleportation takes place, there is no other explanation for the rest of the effect.

Okay, enough with coins. Let's look at almost any Out of This World variation. Another classic, and another good one, and another single point of failure. If the audience believes the deck is completely shuffled before the routine begins, then there is no explanation for the rest of the effect.

These single points of failures within the effects increase the power of the effect if the audience can be made to believe that, at that point, everything is exactly as they perceive it to be. There is a lot of work involved in getting this to happen, and that's where skill and creativity reach an apex in order to bring about that belief. That single point must be the focus of the most time and energy because, without due diligence, the effect goes from good and strong to bad and weak in a flash.

Let's take a look at another classic, the Ambitious Card. Specifically, let's look at a single sequence: a card is selected, signed, lost in the deck, and suddenly appears back on top of the deck. Out of all the things that could be our single point, there is only one, and that's at the point where the signed card is (apparently) lost in the deck. If the audience believes the card truly is lost in the deck, then the effect is strong and good. So how do we best do that?

Taking a look at our arsenal of moves and techniques, we see all sorts of things: switches, doubles, gimmicks... you name it. But the effort has to be put into selecting the method that allows the audience to believe, at that single point, so that the remainder of the effect is powerful. Without putting in that effort at that point, the effect is simply not as strong.

Take for example the misuse I constantly see of an ITR. A dollar bill is wadded up on the palm of the hand and floats in mid air. This effect has a single point of failure: the thread on which the bill resides during the levitation itself. Few performers do anything about working that single point of failure, so too many times the effect is perceived for what it is: strings are being used. The effect becomes a bad one, or, at the very least, not as strong as it should be.

The same effect, done by someone who has taken the time and worked the single point, has taken care to illustrate that no such appliances could be used. Hands are passed all around the balled-up bill, spectators hands are used at times even. I saw one perform through such a subtle (and extremelyt well-practiced) bit around it that I was even questioning the method for a second -- yes, Paul Harris fans, for that second, I was astonished. The effect in that case was very powerful and downright eerie.

So, back to my effect that was missing something.

The routine broke down into this: a card would be selected, two blank cards would be shown, and the name of the selected card would appear written on one of the blank cards.

The method involved a force and the handling of those two blank cards (obviously hiding the previously-written message). Both of these things are possible points of failure. However, the effect is not that a card is chosen -- that's a means to an end. The effect is that the name of the card appears mysteriously in a place where it simply cannot appear.

That's the single point of failure.

No matter what technique I use for the force, the audience -- being neither dull or stupid -- is going to suspect I somehow "made" them pick a certain card. But that simply doesn't matter if the spectator believes those blank cards truly were blank. The audience can make the jump, "He made me pick that card somehow, but there's no way the name of it could just suddenly show up on those cards!". While that is not perfectly satisfactory, it's still leaning toward the impossibility of the effect itself: the name appearing out of nowhere.

That's my single point of failure.

So to pull this effect off, to make it as powerful as possible, the display of those cards has to be absolutely, completely convincing. That single point of failure has to be removed as much as humanly possible.

You see, I was working the other way -- I was concentrating on the force, not on the revelation. Oops.

This is known as "not seeing the forest for the trees."

And also as "ignoring that one point of failure."

Shane