This past weekend I got a chance to be a part of the amazingly innovative brain child of Luis De Matos, David Britland and Marco Tempest, this being the Essential Magic Conference LIVE from Estúdio 33 in Portugal. Over the course of 3 days, 9 sessions and nearly 6 dozen presentations, the Twitter hashtag #EMConference got it’s share of use as people from 38 countries around the world got together to ‘Learn, Share and Collaborate‘. I got goose-bumps as the flagship broadcast got underway to what is being dubbed by many as the “TED” of the magic world. To start, the price was more than a bargain! For $75 you were able to watch the conference live, you get access for 1 year to stream the videos of the presentations AND as if that wasn’t enough, you will get a DVD set of the entire conference along with a few extra clips. During the conference it was announced by magician, speaker and Conjuring Arts Executive Director, Bill Kalush that we would also get a free month to the services provided by the Conjuring Arts Research Center. For the price of roughly a couple of magic lectures, I had the ability to see performances and watch discussions from 33 of the top minds in the magic industry. From the innovative electro-magic of Marco Tempest to the wacky traditional-like style of Gazzo, every corner had a surprise and every presentation had valuable information about performance, style, theory, history and technology. It’s been said many times that all good things come to an end and EMC was no different. As the last session was reaching it’s closing, you couldn’t help but have that “leaving summer camp” feeling of nostalgia but yet deeply satisfied with everything you got to experience.
Although what I’m saying may seem like an infomercial for the EMC, it’s not. This is simply facts and how I felt about my first official magic conference. It would be unfair of me to say that any one part of the conference was my “favorite” because there was so much variety that I learned something different from each individual. I can’t wait until I can go back and relive the conference through the streaming video because I’m sure there was a lot of information that I missed as I watched the live broadcast.
Since this was the first time that anything like this had ever been done, I will say that everything seemed to run really smoothly (despite a couple of microphone issues and people’s chat boxes freezing intermittently). Even when my own connection was set down to .5 MB/second it was remarkably clear and experienced close to no lag. I should state that others did experience minor complications with their own connections and I know there was a small handful of people (out of approx 2,000 attending) that kept dropping their feed.
If I could, I would offer the suggestion of having a message board or forum for the community to continue discussing some of the presentations. I would also have liked to see some of the questions that went unanswered through the chat process answered on a separate page but, who knows? Those options may be there next year. Hell, we may even finally see, De’Vo’s, face. 🙂
To end, I would simple like to say, ‘thank you’ to everyone involved in making EMC happen and ‘thank you’ to Luis, for taking that walk while following the yellow line.