Today I wanted o write about creating feeling in your magic and how I do it. For me having some kind of emotional feeling in the magic is very important, both for the impact of the effect and for the theatrical value. The difficult thing is how to create this feeling in you magic and where to draw the emotion from. As most artists, I pull my feeling from my real life experiences. But how to you do this? Well I am going to explain one example of how I do it.
The picture in the blog post is from Shirakawa-Go which is a World Heritage Site located in Gifu Prefecture in Japan. I went to visit it in November of 2006. What a beautiful place! It’s a place from the past that is protected for us to see now. When I went here what a feeling of wonder I got. It is located in the mountains and is a very peaceful place. To be here and imagine what life was like here 100 year ago or more is just amazing. It is one of many places I have visited that have given me a interesting feeling of real magic. To visit a place like this is magic. This is one of the reasons I love Japan and there are many more places in Japan like this I want to visit.
Anyways back to my topic of creating feeling for magic. Ok the feeling I got from visiting this place is a feeling that I want to share. And what better way than to express the feeling through my magic. So how can you do this? Well this is how I do it. First I think about the feeling I had and how can I express it in words. What adjectives can I use to express how I felt. Second, I listen to music and find some music that has gives me a similar feeling and listen to the words of the music how things are described. Next I write down my descriptions. Next I brain storm some magical effects and think about how the effect alone makes me feel. I then start to play with the magic and just talk trying to use the words I used to describe my thoughts on the place I visited. During this process I slowly come up with a story for a presentation that starts to hold the feelings I want to express. I just think and play and write down the ideas that come. It is like an organized brain storming session. This creates the seed to the routine I will work on and refine that will try to express the feeling I want. Of course this works for emotions and feelings you have from other life situations as well. This idea is all a little esoteric but you have to let go and really not be scared and just go with comes to you when you are doing the brainstorming with the effects and your feelings. I often just talk to myself like I am doing a show ad lib. This really helps and gets my brain moving.
This idea is a bit esoteric as I mentioned but it is how I do it. I hope it makes a bit of sense for you and I hope you can take something from it to use to apply feeling to your magic. If you have an interesting way that you use for adding feeling please let me know!
Aaron