#hat tricks

Hat Tricks, April 2021

Oil on canvas

“Got a call out of the blue a while back from a production company that was looking for someone to teach one of their actors some hat manipulation moves. The actor, Andrew Lee Potts, is playing the role of the Mad Hatter in a show that’s taking it’s cues from the Alice in Wonderland mythology and having the Hatter being able to manipulate his hat seemed reasonably important.

Now anyone who’s don’t much hat manipulation will realize from the picture that the hat that they hat selected for the role wasn’t the ideal hat to be manipulated. I got the picture that accompanies this post to help me get a sense of what the actor was going to be working with.

Long story short, I hooked up with Andrew yesterday in his hotel and spent a bunch of time  discussing how the hat was being used in the show and which basic tricks would be good for him to learn. The basic routine went something like – I demo a trick, he’d say yes or no to whether he wanted to learn it and how it might be used. I’d then walk through the mechanics of the trick with him, get him to try it a number of times, then he’d film me doing it both at slow speed and at regular speed and then we’d move on to the next trick.

I figured he’d need about a half dozen moves to pull off the appearance of knowing how to manipulate a hat and by the time we were done he had 5 – 10 things to work on which seemed about right. We didn’t actually use all of the time that had been scheduled for the session, but Andrew admitted to having a bit of a hang-over and after getting what he needed from me, he seemed content to work on the moves himself…

It’s a bit insane to think you can become a master of a skill in one teaching session, but I think the trick for me was to figure out which tricks were going to be easiest to learn reasonably quickly and would have the greatest effect on-camera. Also a lot can be cleaned up in the edit, so hopefully the Hatter will be able to pull it all off when the director calls “ACTION!”

— The Checkerboard Guy, “Working with actors”

Well, because the kombatants didn't