On YouTube there's a video of magician Criss Angel taking the old "sawing a woman in half" trick a step further. He actually pulls a woman in half, whereupon her upper half crawls away in horror while her legs remain behind wriggling. I, like many other people, have been trying to figure out how he does this trick. All I can conclude is that it's achieved by clever editing of the camera footage. (Which, if true, would make it less a magic trick than a special effect, but entertaining nonetheless.) My reasoning is that the (half of a) woman who crawls away at the end is probably not fake. She's likely a woman who, in real life, has no legs. But this cannot be the same woman who initially walks to the table and lies down on it. (No, I don't think she was using robotic legs, or anything like that.) They are two different women. Which means that at some point the camera must have been turned off, and the one woman replaced the other on the table. This also suggests that everyone in the crowd were actors. That's my theory. But I'm actually hoping it's wrong, because it would be cool if he could have done this without turning the camera off at some point. (Thanks to Captain DaFt for the link.) (And I could have sworn I once posted about another Criss Angel trick in which he crawled through a glass window pane, but for the life of me I can't find the post about this.)
Comments
http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/pullapart.asp
They claim that it was not done with any camera tricks. They also say to watch the video multiple times with a skeptical eye, and you might be able to figure it out. I'm not sure how they're so positive of their reasoning. Either way, I'm still stumped on the issue...
Oh, and I know which page your talking about with the glass, Alex, but I can't find it either. I think it was in the forum...
Here it is, Alex. Just as baffling to me as this one:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/forums/viewthread/738/
Oh, and I just got Hippo Eats Dwarf and I love it...
Hey, no shame in that. My wife happened to have been one of the observers years ago when David Copperfield did his train car levitation trick. From what she told me, Copperfield uses a lookalike for some of his tricks.
SPOILER ALERT:
Basically, if you ever see "Copperfield" wear sunglasses in the course of one of his tricks, it ain't him, it's the lookalike. My wife says the two are very similar in appearance, except for the eyes, which explains the shades.
Maybe I should post more often!
Oh, and I didn't research enough to learn that was Johnny Eck from Freaks in the older trick. However, I'm glad that you pointed that out, as Freaks is one of my favorite movies. I find that interesting that Snopes would be so smug about the answer, yet give away a clear clue to find it. However, I still can't figure out the legs. The contortionist theory from BigDan actually sounds to be the most plausible.
You have a good theory about it.
Why would a volunteer laughed and walked away when seeing her legs standing up? It doesn't make any sense. She SHOULD look shocked and maybe demand to put her torso back to her legs immediately. Also, why did not they filming her torso putting on her legs at the end?
That was one of the person who posted at Youtube.com
and this is what i think:
there are simply 2 girls: one legless and one dwarf. The legless one is being carried by the dwarf. Therefore they chose a long black skirt hiding up a whole dwarf. It looks like there are only legs in the skirt, but note that it is a very very long one(compare it to the other ppl around at the beginning, they look all much smaller).
It's a perfect illusion but no magic at all
(0.40)Note when the woman is sitting on the bench, she immediately puts her hands on the bench(like pushing hardly herself up so that she doesn't fall backwards)
From the moment on the magician is hitting on her belly, the dwarf crawls even a little deeper in the skirt and also hides his arms.
Please check the pictures i did, i drawed in the 2 persons in blue and red:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iRdv_VNPe7g&search=criss%20angel
I don't know how this guy does it...
My guess is they are held together by some kind of harness.
Now, as he leads her to the bench you can see him putting his hands on her 'back', leading the (contortionist's) legs the right way.
Then, when she sits down she holds on tight to the edge of the bench while Criss leads her backwards so she won't fall backwards or loosen the harness. He has the girls hold the legs and arms while he unlocks the harness by 'pushing' the middle of the woman.
The girl holding the feet is an accomplice. Observe how Angel tells the girls to pull simultaneously, but the girl holding the feet isn't pulling at all, for this would pull the contortionist off the bench. Also she is the only one who could see under the skirt and see the 'legs' person. As the torso screams and 'runs' off, the attention is distracted from the legs, or any odd shape the skirt might have. All in all a neat but classic trick of distraction and misleading the audience
Sorry for the run-on sentence, but this sort of switcheroo is an extremely old school tactic for swapping in someone who's in on the gag.
Both girls pulling seem to be in on it. the girl holding the arms pulls way too hard and then holds on to the 'torso' as she puts her gently on the ground. A more plausible reaction would be to let go of the arms as one would not be held responsable for pulling somebody in half.
Oh and in retrospect i don't think the leg person is bent backward but forward:
known in yoga as 'Uttanasana'
its a splitsecond..
-maybe he made a mistake because he pressed down on it a little too much. It looks as if the midportion is made of cardboard or something... (making the skirt area even smaller for a contortionist to fit into) But do you guys think its still possible? Maybe if the contortionist is really that good??
The woman that walks to the bench is not the same woman they pull apart.
Notice they camera cuts away right before the pulling and when it cuts back - the woman on the bench now has:
a. shorter arms
b. her hair in a pony tail that shows her ears (they were completely covered seconds before)
c. her shirt is now tucked in to the skirt, instead if out
interesting...
I might have to rethink my theory.. it looks like there are 2 different women involved after all
it's obviously not "really real" because human beings don't operate that way in real life, no matter how hard the audience screams.
It looks like a load of manipulated imges. The shadows look very strange - they appear on the wall, AND on the ground. Then when he is walking back down towards the ground there's no shadow at all (sun behind a cloud?) until he reaches the ground.
Some shots look as though tey've been painted -all very unconvincing!
Look, part of the secret of magic is making tricks look more complicated than they are. Take it on faith that no camera tricks were used. Look at the stunt again.
You KNOW that's either a dwarf or an amputee as the top half. C'mon. Admit it. You know.
I mentioned in the first post that a confederate was very obviously used, and how you can tell.
Given that information, and other posters' info, (I'm actually a fan of the "yoga position" posters,) you can see that things like robotics, camera tricks, hiring an entire audience for the camera tricks, etc., are way too expensive for one freakin' magic trick that doesn't need them.
There was a swap of women. For a few details between the camera cut when Criss walks arround the bench to perform the actual split dont match up.
1) Before de camera cut, the women's shirt in on top of her skirt while after the cut it is tucked in the skirt.
2) Before the cut, the girl holding the arms leans at about 45 degrees to be able to reach the hands. After the cut she doesn't lean as much as if the women on the bench is now much taller.
3) Her feet are much smaller after the cut than before.
4) Is a women not used to be cut in half would start walking away from her legs like she's been walking on her hands all her life?
If you looks closely in slow motion at every trick that Criss Angel does there is always something that doesn't add up between two camera shots. Like the one where he himself gets cut in half, at one point his sandals are position nicely side by side, then a camera cut later one faces one direction and the other one faces another direction.
Very disapointing.
As far as the half woman trick is concerned: I am inclined to agree with those who think a switch was made. The left part of her skirt that hangs over the side of the bench suddenly appears to grow in size. It could be that the woman started off in two parts and there were two takes of the trick (and no substitution) which were edited together. However, if that were the case the onlookers would have seen the trick already and wouldn't be surprised the second time.
None of the onlookers did what I would have done - look down the skirt. Apart from the two pullers (who were definately stooges), the rest of the group were in on the trick.
I don't think Mr Angel should be critised for NOT pulling a woman in two. We know it didn't really happen and part of the fun of these tricks is working out how he pulled it off (if you see what I mean).
http://youtube.com/watch?v=H6W98GlFzvY&mode=related&search;=
see Criss spill the beans:
http://media.putfile.com/Criss-Angel-Levitation-Revealed-20
Actually, if you look back, you'll see that that is one of my points.
I pointed out just when the confederate was swapped in in my very first post.
My main point, though, is that these "hoaxes" ("gags," really,) are made to look much more complicated than they are. That's an *important* part of misdirection.
Notice how when David Blaine did his famous "levitation", he'd draw his arms down as if he were lifting himself on something? I did.
That kept people looking for wires, ledges, etc. when dude was just bending his foot.
My specialty (in the subgenre of magic) is cards, but with any one slight, I could convince you I was doing dozens of different tricks in dozens of ways. I could literally make the four aces vanish and pull them out of a spectator's ass, if I were so inclined. (Hmmmm.)
All that fancy stuff and flourishes card magicians do? That's so you think they're cheating at that point. The real moves are slow, smooth and, in good hands, invisible.
Before the pulling: The woman in white, who's supposed to pull from above, bents his hips to be able to grab the arms of the woman. It seems that there's not enough length for her to stand straight.
After that scene: The woman in white is now standing straight and her arms are slightly bent, it seems that the woman was longer than the first scene. Her elbows were slightly bent, enough room length to stand straight..
The contortionist theory doesn't hold up, as the bottom half is ON THE BENCH. Do you expect a person who's already bent in half to be laying on the bench and look like she's flat on the bench?
Also, to support the theory that there is NO switching of a person, notice when the lady first sits and lies down on the bench. Notice that Criss Angel, holds her head and lays her down. This is to support the top half (the legless lady) from suddenly falling down onto the bench.
And i think they ask what the guests have studied in school. I believe these people have not studied in science, where you have a sceptic mind and check out possiblities and so forth.
PS: Also put 'Criss Angel chair' in You Tube and you will see a bunch of people leviatate with the same video quality.
movies/tv shows use paid actors, special effects, and editing all the time w/o calling it "magic", why the hell does this hack get to label the same stuff an "illusion?" his other tricks that need no actors that i have seen are either extremely textbook(slipping a card into a beer bottle, coin tricks, levitation etc) or simply stuntmen work(setting yourself on fire). the only thing that makes this guy original is that he has the gaul to be completely obvious with his "tricks"... three episodes and i hate him already.