We have arrived at Weber’s fifth pillar — eliminate weak spots — and I want to start with the single piece of advice that, more than any other, forced me to confront the gap between the performer I thought I was and the performer I actually was.
Videotape yourself. Then watch it. Then watch it again. And again. And again. And again.
Ken Weber writes in Maximum Entertainment that the video camera is the most important breakthrough ever for mystery performers — more important than any prop, any technique, any gimmick. He is not exaggerating. And the reason he is not exaggerating is not because video shows you what you are doing right. It is because video shows you what you are doing wrong, and your brain will fight like hell to prevent you from seeing it.
Let me tell you about the first time I watched a recording of myself perform.
The Recording
It was about a year and a half into performing regularly for Vulpine Creations. A corporate event in Vienna, a solid crowd, a set I knew well. I had asked a friend to record the show on his phone from the back of the room — nothing fancy, just a wide shot of the performance area. He propped the phone against a water pitcher and let it run.
The show went well, I thought. Good audience, strong reactions, felt smooth. I was riding the pleasant post-show glow that comes from a performance where nothing went wrong and the applause felt genuine. I was already mentally categorizing it as one of my better nights.
The next morning, in my hotel room, coffee in hand, I opened the video.
The first thing I noticed was that the person on screen did not look like me. Not in the literal sense — obviously it was me. But the version of me on screen bore almost no resemblance to the version of me that existed in my head during the performance. The person in my head was dynamic, engaging, commanding. The person on screen was… smaller. More tentative. Less present than I remembered being.
The second thing I noticed was the fidgeting. I fidget. I did not know this. I thought I was standing relatively still, moving with purpose, using my hands deliberately. The video showed a person who could not stop shifting his weight from foot to foot, who touched his ear during transitions, who had a habit of adjusting his jacket that recurred approximately every ninety seconds. These were not grand gestures. They were tiny, unconscious movements that I had absolutely no awareness of.
The third thing I noticed was the pacing. I was fast. Much faster than I thought. Sections of the performance that had felt deliberate and well-timed from the inside felt rushed and breathless from the outside. I was not giving the audience time to react. I was stepping on my own moments, moving to the next beat before the current one had fully landed.
The fourth thing I noticed was my face. When I was not actively speaking, when I was performing an action or waiting for a response, my face went blank. Not neutral — neutral can be powerful. Blank. Empty. As if my personality left the building every time my mouth stopped moving. The difference between my animated, engaged speaking face and my dead, vacant doing face was stark and uncomfortable.
I watched the entire thirty-minute recording in growing discomfort. Then I put the phone down and sat with it.
My first reaction, and I am being completely honest here, was denial. My brain immediately began generating explanations for why the video was wrong. The angle was bad. The phone distorted things. The lighting made me look different. It was an unusually off night and I was much better normally.
Weber predicted this. He warns that you must watch yourself perform multiple times because the first viewings will be filtered through your self-image. You will see how clever you are, how smooth your technique is, how well the routine flows. You will not see the fidgets, the dead spots, the pacing problems, the facial vacancy. Your ego will protect you from those observations with remarkable efficiency.
It took five viewings before I started to actually see what was there.
The Five-Viewing Protocol
Here is what I learned about watching yourself, and what I now recommend to anyone who asks.
Viewing one is useless for self-improvement. You are too emotionally involved. You are watching for confirmation that you are good, and you will find it. Every laugh sounds louder, every reaction seems bigger, every smooth moment confirms your self-image. The problems are invisible because you are not looking for them.
Viewing two is slightly better. The excitement has faded. You start to notice things at the periphery — a transition that feels long, a moment where the energy dips. But you are still explaining them away. “That was just because the audience was settling” or “I was adjusting to the room’s acoustics.” The rationalizations come fast and feel convincing.
Viewing three is where the denial starts to crack. By now, you have seen the fidget for the third time. You have noticed the blank face at the same moment in the routine for the third time. You have felt the rushed pacing at the same point for the third time. Repetition makes patterns undeniable. Your brain can explain away a single instance. It cannot explain away a pattern.
Viewing four is the hard one. This is where you start watching with pen and paper, as Weber recommends, and you start writing down what you see without editorial comment. Not “I should work on my transitions” but “Transition between routine two and routine three: twelve seconds of dead air, weight shifting, hand touches ear, eye contact breaks.” Specific. Observable. Factual. This viewing hurts because the specificity makes the problems real.
Viewing five is where you can finally start working. By now, the ego has exhausted its defenses. You have seen the patterns. You have documented them. You can no longer pretend they are not there. And from this place of grudging acceptance, you can actually begin to improve.
I know five viewings sounds excessive. I know most people will watch once, wince, and delete the file. But the people who watch once and wince are doing the hardest part — they are watching — and getting almost none of the benefit, because they are not watching long enough for the truth to penetrate.
What Video Reveals That Feelings Cannot
The fundamental problem with evaluating your own performance from the inside is that you are experiencing a completely different reality than the audience. You are experiencing intentions, internal rhythms, emotional states, the satisfaction of technical execution. The audience is experiencing what they can see and hear. These are wildly different things.
When I felt like I was pausing dramatically, the video showed I was pausing for about one second — barely perceptible from the outside. When I felt like I was maintaining strong eye contact, the video showed my gaze darting between three spots on the back wall. When I felt like I was projecting confidence, the video showed a person who was competent but guarded.
This gap between intention and perception is universal. Every performer has it. The only question is whether you have the courage and the methodology to discover it.
Video is that methodology. It is the closest thing to an objective mirror that exists. It shows you what the audience sees, stripped of all the internal commentary that colors your experience. It is ruthless, unforgiving, and essential.
The Specific Habits I Discovered
Since that first recording in Vienna, I have recorded dozens of performances. Some from the audience, some from the side, some from a tripod position that gives me a full-stage view. Each recording reveals something new, but the initial discoveries were the most impactful.
The fidgeting was the first thing I worked on. Once I saw the weight-shifting pattern, I could feel it happening during the next rehearsal. Awareness came first — video created the awareness — and then I could address it. I began rehearsing with conscious attention to my lower body, planting my feet and holding position unless I was moving with purpose. Within a few weeks, the habitual shifting had diminished significantly.
The blank face was harder. It turned out that my facial engagement was directly tied to my speaking. When I was talking, my face was alive. When I stopped talking, my face checked out. The fix required me to rehearse what I call “thinking face” — maintaining an expression of engagement and interest even during silent actions. I practiced in front of a mirror, which felt absurd but worked. I would perform a routine in silence and watch my own face, training myself to stay expressive even when the words stopped.
The pacing problem was the most significant discovery. I was consistently rushing the moments that I thought were my strongest. The reveals, the climaxes, the transitions between effects — I was blowing through them at a pace that gave the audience no time to process. When I slowed down — deliberately, uncomfortably slow from my perspective — the video showed a pace that looked natural and well-timed from the outside.
This is one of the most counterintuitive lessons video teaches you: what feels agonizingly slow from the inside looks perfectly normal from the outside. And what feels perfectly normal from the inside looks rushed from the outside. Your internal clock is not calibrated to the audience’s experience, and without video, you have no way to know this.
The Ongoing Practice
Recording myself has become a non-negotiable part of my process. Not every show — that would be logistically impossible and also slightly compulsive — but regularly enough that I maintain an accurate picture of what my performance actually looks like from the outside.
I have developed a specific review protocol. After recording, I wait at least twenty-four hours before watching. Same-day viewing is too emotionally charged. Then I watch all the way through once without taking notes, just to re-experience the show. Then I watch segment by segment — Weber recommends breaking the performance into ever-smaller units, down to thirty-second chunks — with a notebook, documenting specific observations.
I look for patterns across multiple recordings. A fidget that appears once might be a random occurrence. A fidget that appears in every recording is a habit that needs addressing. A pacing issue in one show might be audience-specific. A pacing issue across five shows is a structural problem in the routine.
The hardest recordings to watch are the ones from shows I thought went well. When a show goes badly, watching the recording is painful but not surprising — you already knew something was off. When a show goes well, and the recording reveals problems you did not feel, the cognitive dissonance is genuinely destabilizing. You thought you were good. The video says you were decent. The gap between good and decent is where all the growth lives, and it is only visible on camera.
The Consultant’s Advantage
One thing that helped me adopt this practice more readily than some performers might is that video review is standard in my consulting world. We record presentations and review them in debrief sessions. We watch client pitches with fresh eyes. The culture of “let’s see what actually happened versus what we thought happened” was already part of my professional DNA.
What I found was that the same resistance exists in consulting. Partners who have been presenting for twenty years still wince when they see themselves on video. They still discover verbal tics they did not know they had. They still find that their pacing, energy, and physical presence look different from the outside than they feel from the inside.
The performers who improve fastest — in consulting and in magic — are the ones who make video review a habit rather than an event. Not a special occasion where you brace yourself for the hard truth, but a regular practice that keeps your self-image calibrated to reality.
The Director You Cannot Afford
Weber makes the point that every performer needs a director — someone who can watch from the audience’s perspective and tell you what is really happening. Most of us cannot afford a professional director. We do not have a David Mamet sitting in the third row taking notes, as Ricky Jay famously did.
But we all have a phone with a camera. And that camera, combined with the willingness to watch what it captures honestly and repeatedly, is the closest most of us will ever get to having a director. It is not the same as a skilled human observer who can articulate nuance and suggest solutions. But it is infinitely better than nothing, and nothing is what most performers currently use.
The fifth pillar — eliminate weak spots — begins here. You cannot eliminate what you cannot see. And you cannot see what you are doing on stage from the inside. The video camera is the tool that makes the invisible visible. The five-viewing protocol is the process that makes the visible actionable.
Everything that follows in this section — the discussion of speed, of pauses, of the balance between magic and personality, of becoming your own director — builds on this foundation. If you are not recording and reviewing your performances, everything else is guesswork. Educated guesswork, perhaps. Well-intentioned guesswork. But guesswork nonetheless.
Record yourself. Watch it five times. Then start working on what you see.
It will be the most uncomfortable and the most valuable thing you do for your craft.