Awesome card flourishes

PeaceLove sez, "Dan and Dave (the Buck Twins), who pretty much single-handedly created the current craze for extreme card flourishes, have teamed up with clothing design firm English Laundry. They know how to make card flourishes cool, as this spot demonstrates."

English Laundry + Dan and Dave // MAGIC (Thanks, PeaceLove!)

• [MooseDesign]

  Well… others have already said it, but the cut out arms are shame. As cool as the techniques are, without a single focal action, its all over the place. Personally, I ended up settling on watching the cards, not the shirts, so it was pretty much a failure on that count.

  But I do enjoy the “single-handedly” in reference to not one, but two hands, and not one but two people,

• [PeaceLove]

  Wow, surprised this didn’t go over better with the BBers! I think it’s pretty cool, but then again I’m a bit of a card hound so I’m not exactly unbiased.

  I believe the arms and hands are all filmed in a single take, just overlaid on the backing shirts.

  But I do enjoy the “single-handedly” in reference to not one, but two hands, and not one but two people.

  Ha ha, funny! Good point. It should have read, “Dan & Dave almost quadruple-handedly created a genre of hardcore card manipulation.”

• [IamInnocent]

  “Card flourishes”: I didn’t know that word, flourishes, for that sort of cards manipulation. I love it! It flourishes in my mouth. :)

• [MarkM]

  its a bad shirt ad! no its a bad card flourish video!
  wait! its a bad shirt ad AND a bad card flourish video.
  its 2 bad videos in one!
  -
  to echo what the previous people have voiced, without the
  jerky “hand-held” camera affect and the camera cuts, it
  /would/ be a good card flourish video; no modification
  could make this into a good shirt ad, however.

• [Anonymous]

  The cut out effect on the arms is so distracting! Arg, its too bad because Dan and Dave are so amazing. I’ve posted a bunch of their stuff before on my magic blog. They did a really great spot on Discovery channel’s “Time Warp”. You can see the clip here: http://www.onlinemagicclub.com/2009/12/04/dan-and-dave-buck-on-time-warp/

• [ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive]

  Card tricks just don’t work when you cut the arms out and animate the rest of the body. It also doesn’t seem amazing when you change the frame rate to 16 frames per second or do cascading frame effects. It’s best presented without a lot of cuts. Someone recommended these guys to me when I was guestblogging. I’ve seen several of their videos and every single one is ruined by a video editor who wants to get creative.

• [huntsu]

  The constantly changing background made me motion sick, and distracted from the cards. It looked more like video editing tricks than actual artistry, even if it is.

• [misterfricative]

  I just want to echo what #3 and #4 have already said: I was looking forward to seeing these guys strut their stuff — but the stop motion effect completely undermines the artistry of the card flourishes. And then there’s the additional annoyance of the never-ending barrage of shirts. They could hardly have gotten this more wrong.

• [Anonymous]

  There is a “current craze for extreme card flourishes?” Who knew?

• [Anonymous]

  That’s weird – the instant I heard “extreme card flourish”, I immediately heard Europe’s “Final Countdown”, tasted a chocolate-covered banana and heard a Segway scooter riding over rough terrain.

  -Darren MacLennan

• [Wordguy]

  Oh no! This shirt commercial didn’t honor the sacred art of card flourishing enough for me!

  Actually, I thought D&D came off better in the Cingular Blackjack commercial:

  http://www.dananddave.com/about/cingular-blackjack-phone/

• [JoeKickass]

  That would have been a whole lot cooler without the special effects.

• [Nollie]

  ugly shirts.

• [nox]

  At 22 seconds in there’s a shirt that’s giving me the black dot illusion.

  http://images.google.com/images?client=opera&rls=en&q=black+dot+illusion