"Slomotion" by Joe Litvinchuk

Name: "Slomotion" by Joe Litvinchuk
From: Hocus Pocus
Price: $34.95
Genre: Close-up/ Mentalism

Basic effect: As a demonstration of your powers of telekinesis, you borrow a Lifesaver mint from the audience and, as you're in a coffee shop, a wooden stirrer. The spectator threads the circular sweet onto the stirrer, ensuring everything is copacetic. Cleanly showing two empty hands, you gently grab both ends of the stirrer and concentrate.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the mint begins to rotate of its own accord - first one way, then the other - all at your command! At the end you give out the props for examination and claim your free coffee...

Or... caught in the cue for Burger King, knuckle rolling a coin or spinning a card on your finger, someone notices your magic abilities and asks t be shown something. Asking to borrow a Lifesaver mint and then, looking around, a straw from the nearby dispenser, you get the eager spectator to thread one onto the other. Clearly showing your empty hands, you gently touch either end of the straw and concentrate.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the mint begins to rotate of its own accord - first one way, then the other - all at your command! At the end you give out the props for examination and claim your free burger...

Comments: Basically, the effect is that you either get to spin a mint on a coffee stirrer or a straw - how you present it is down to you.

On ripping open the small parcel from America and opening the box you will find...

- Straw
- Coffee stirrer
- Lifesaver mint (an oversized, individually-wrapped Polo mint)
- Velvet bag, in which is...
- The secret gimmick
- DVD

The straw, stirrer and mint are totally ungimmicked, and have just been included so that you can literally do the effect straight out of the box. The DVD doesn't last long, but covers all the salient points of how to use the gimmick to make the mint rotate.
The mint is all white and has a subtle pattern on it - just enough so that you can tell it's spinning. One idea seen in the demo is to draw arrows on the mint which makes it easier to see spinning.

The one effect that everyone is comparing this to is Ultracinese, the effect where a nut spins right off a bolt. The latter effect is very expensive, requires some degree of set-up, and may not work with all types of nut and bolt (I maybe wrong on this).

Slomotion is cheap(er), requires practically zero set-up and can be performed naked!!! And it is arguably more organic than spinning a nut on a bolt.

And yes, it does work with our native Polo mints. What's better, is that you can get different objects to spin - I've managed to spin my wedding ring on the straw. It's feasible that you could find other objects on which to spin things - pencils, small wands etc. There's no guarantee it will work, but it's well worth experimenting with.

Which brings us to the actual gimmick. It's small, ingenious and comes with a spare battery to prolong use. You should have no trouble in obtaining more replacement batteries as required.

Some people have reserved doubts about the 'noise' the gimmick makes. Maybe, when practicing in front of your webcam you can hear a slight something, but in a realistic performing environment the miniscule amount of noise it might make will be drowned out. I say "might make" because the amount of noise it makes depends on what you're using, and I really can't say more than that.

It's a lovely off-the-wall little effect that you could use to demonstrate "your powers", or use for those off-beat 'Blaine' moments.

Highly recommended!

Mark

Many thanks, Mark.

It's somewhat unfortunate that someone (cannot remember where I was reading it yesterday) inadvertently tipped the gimmick to some extent (no pun intended).

This sounds like my sort of thing - thanks again.

Dave