Stephen Hobbs on the Technical Toolbox: A Short Interview

Over the year that Stephen Hobbs’ Technical Toolbox was published, I received a variety of questions and comments from friends and viewers. In this pastiche interview, I attempt to answer some of these queries and give you a sense of my goals and aspiration for this project.

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Q: What were you thinking???

Well in retrospect that’s a good question. I’ve been passionate about card magic for more than two decades. Although I’ve been privileged to write several books about respected card workers, I had never put any of my own material into circulation. I thought I would attempt a very different approach to sharing my ideas with a few friends, a long-form project that would evolve over the course of a single year.

Q: You released a large amount of material on the Technical Toolbox, why make it free?

Sure, I could have charged to access the Technical Toolbox. Or I could have sold this material in other formats, like one-off digital downloads. But that wasn’t really the point. I viewed the Technical Toolbox as a gift back to the magical community, as a way to thank my friends – and other card enthusiasts whom I’ve never even met – for all the enjoyment I have received from card magic over the last twenty-five years. At the same time I also wanted to make a small point: not every magic trick has to be sold, not every idea that comes into your head needs to be marketed. It’s not that I’m opposed to people making money by selling tricks; it’s just that for me the joy is in the creative process itself. That is, the individual creative process that I go through in thinking about card moves and effects. I just never felt compelled to take the next step of marketing and selling my ideas.

Q: And yet you agreed to produce this as a download through Vanishing Inc.?

Yes, for several good reasons. As the year came to an end, and I realized just how much time and effort it had taken to create the Technical Toolbox, I decided that it would be nice to have a more permanent home for the material. I was also becoming concerned about possibly losing the videos. I’m not super tech savvy. The only place the videos (and everything else associated with the site) was saved was on the website itself. Nothing was backed-up on Dropbox, or whatever, and I was worried I might lose everything. Even though I was planning to take the site off-line at the end of the year, I still wanted to permanently archive the material somewhere.

So when Andi Gladwin and Joshua Jay indicated they were willing to take on the task of converting the site into a polished digital download, I was thrilled. It seemed like the perfect solution and they, with the assistance of Mark Woodsford, have done a fantastic job of bringing the project to fruition.

Finally, Andi and Josh didn’t hesitate when I suggested that we mutually agree to donate our profits from the project to charity; so that allowed me to continue the concept of giving back, which was the whole reason for the Technical Toolbox in the first place.

Q: What do you mean when you say that you wanted this to be a “long form” project?

One thing that strikes me about the magical world these days is that everything has an extremely short half- life. Books, DVD’s, magazine articles, digital downloads: they are here and then gone. Literally, a performer can release a DVD, receive great reviews, and a few weeks later it’s MIA; magical consumers have gone on to the next thing. Now, I don’t know anything about the economics of this – and I assume people are making money, or are otherwise satisfied, with this short life-cycle – but I wanted to try something different.

I wanted to see if I could create a project that would allow me to maintain an audience over a longer period of time. I wanted to introduce some simple tools and then gradually explore and develop them over weeks and months. I was hoping that this would allow the material to grow in the mind of the audience, that by looping back to different concepts over the course of a year, the interested reader would have time to think up their own ideas and then compare them with what I was doing. At the most basic level, I was trying to create a feedback loop – “Come see something cool or interesting every Friday morning!” – that would inspire viewers to return to the site and continue to reconsider and evaluate what I had to offer.

Q: I noticed you said “interested reader” in your last answer.

Well, yes. At heart I’ve always viewed the Technical Toolbox as a book. In fact, huge chunks of it are actually written up in manuscript form. But as a book it was just too unwieldy. Descriptions of card sleights take a large amount of space to write up and there would have had to be hundreds of illustrations. It was just too much.

So I decided to keep most interesting parts of a book, the introductions and the crediting history, in written form and do the actual explanations as videos. In my mind, Stephen Hobbs’ Technical Toolbox is sort of a visual book.

Don’t get me wrong. I love books. It just seemed that a virtual blog was a better medium for what I wanted to accomplish.

Q: Can you comment on the design of the Technical Toolbox website?

I spent a huge amount of time on the design of the site. I think most magic blogs suck when it comes to design. I particulary hate pages of rolling posts that you have to scroll down forever. I also hate the lack of indexes and impossible-to-negotiate complexes of nesting links.

I tried to make the Technical Toolbox very simple. There were only four pages a viewer could access: a Log-In page, a Home page, the Table of Contents page, and a Credits page. That was it. Most importantly, from the start of the year the Table of Contents listed the entire year’s worth of material in advance. The viewer had to go through the Table of Contents to get to each week’s material, and in doing so was reminded of the previous week’s posts and got a glimpse of what’s coming up. I really think that helped to keep people engaged in the process over the course of the year.

Also, I tried to keep each of the weekly substantive pages visually simple. Text on the left, videos on the right. Simply navigation buttons on the bottom of each the page. Originally I was going to have credits on the same page, which would make more sense, but doing so made each weekly page too long. So I put the credits on one page, with links back to the individual weeks. Although this was a compromise, it seemed to work well.

Q: Did anyone express concern that “lay people” might access the site?

Not really. I think the password took care of that. You had to know something about magic, or at least be willing to take the step of learning something about magic, to gain access.

Q: Did you advertise the site?

No. I sent out a notice to eight or nine friends by e-mail. I was expecting about forty or fifty interested card workers. I was pleasantly stunned to get an average of 900 to 1000 unique viewers each week. It goes to show the power of the internet.

Q: So why do we never see your face?

There are a number of reasons for that. Most basically, this was a project that lasted an entire year. Many of the videos were shot late at night when I probably looked like hell. I really didn’t want to worry about shaving or whatever just to film another clip. Also, I only had a single camera, so the idea of multiple shots, performer-view shots, or full body shots was just out. I simply didn’t have time to film every sleight or effect from three angles and edit the best set of clips together.

At the end of the day, every artistic project is a compromise. I wasn’t trying to make a movie. I was trying to describe card sleights and I felt that the best way to do that was by focusing on my hands and only my hands. Obviously and undoubtedly, something is lost by that choice; particularly in the performance of some of the routines. But I think it was the best choice for this project.

Q: How long did it take to film each week?

It just varied. The vast majority of the videos were shot in a single take. Sometimes, however, it would take three or four tries; usually because I forgot to include something that was meaningful or important in the description (there were no scripts, I just tried to describe what I was doing as I went along). And, of course, sometimes there were just flubs. But mostly it was a one-off shot for each sleight or routine. But it wasn’t just filming the videos. They had to be uploaded to the computer, edited (a process which I tried to streamline to a bare minimum), and then uploaded to the website. As an estimate, every ten minutes of video was at least an hour of work, and often more.

Q: What are some of your favorite items on the Technical Toolbox?

That’s really hard to answer. I like different weeks for different reasons. The ribbon-spread switch-out is so cool that I can’t help listing it as one of my favorites. I love the subterranean addition (and devoted three weeks to discussing it). I really think that the control grip concept is a breakthrough (one viewer sent me an e-mail proclaiming: “control grip has changed my life”). But I like the smaller items as well, like “The Battle of Wits”, the through-the-fist-reversal, the thumbnail double peel, and the interlaced block transfer techniques. It’s too hard to choose, everything is on the site for a reason.

Q: Are there weeks you don’t like?

There’s one week that fell below my expectations, but I’ll keep that to myself.

Q: And so, for the big question, would you attempt a project like the Technical Toolbox again?

No! Well, maybe in another twenty-five years…

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If you want to learn more about this legendary card magic project, click here to take a closer look at "Stephen Hobbs’ Technical Toolbox" and everything it has to offer.