Blake Vogt I admire your brain. I love your videos you make and the tricks you put out. Do you have a workspace? Or do you work in different places?
Jeki Yoo Mainly, I work on my ideas at home, here, in my place. These days I travel a lot, but mostly I create at home because on the road it is difficult to focus. I might add to my script or work on simple ideas, but mostly I work at home.
BV You seem to have a background with origami, given all the paper stuff you do….
JY Two years ago, I decided to create a pop-up and magic video. I gave myself one year. I released it, and I hoped the video would have gone to a wider audience, but it didn’t work out. I did get many positive reactions from magicians, though, and actually I got a message from Penn & Teller because they really liked it. At the moment I am really focusing on my live shows though.
BV How do you get work? You seem to be very busy.
JY Two years ago, I met my agent, and she really helps me to get gigs in the United States. So, I’m really happy with that. These days, I do theater shows and college shows all over the States.
BV Is the show locked in? Or are you changing it, putting stuff in or out?
JY Right now I have a set show, but I want to try to add more stuff. I need to stretch it a little bit so I will try to add more ideas there.
BV And do you still do close-up stuff?
JY I love close-up magic and still practice my sleight of hand, but mostly it’s parlor and comedy ideas for the stage show in my commercial work.
BV I love your videos too, the stuff that you’ve created for social media.
JY I really appreciate it. I started the videos during the pandemic, and I use a lot of the advantages that come with filming with just one camera from one perspective. At the time, I wanted to share a fun vibe during the pandemic, so I tried to put a little comedy into things, or my, “Oh my!”
BV Where did that come from?
JY I used to say, “Oh my gosh!” in all the videos. But sometimes, when I spent three or four hours filming just one video I was very exhausted. So I just shortened the words to “Oh my!” and that’s how it started. People started to follow me, and quoted it in the comments section. I liked that and it stuck.
BV Does this cross over into your stage work? Do you do stuff with a camera and projector in your stage performances, or do you stick with bigger props?
JY Mostly I do parlor or stage material… and sometimes quick change as well. Occasionally I will do something smaller, but always in a way that means it plays big. One day I would love to perform some of my stuff that uses a glass table live onstage, and I am working to try and do that this year, but I’m actually not that good at techy things—so I am learning how I can use cameras and project.
BV A lot of the glass-table stuff you do on social media would fry people’s brains onstage. It would be really cool, but you’d have to have a very specific setup. And that might be tough to travel with, too, I guess.
As I said before, I feel like I see a lot of your paper stuff, so I would love to jam like paper magic with you. Do you know a lot of origami or pop-up stuff, or did you come up with it while working on those videos?
JY While working on the videos I used to learn stuff from YouTube, as well as courses from paper engineers. And then I just keep adding the new ideas I came across.
BV That’s so cool. My grandma taught me a lot of origami when I was a little kid. I could sit around and play with paper for hours.
JY had this little origami idea before. It’s a pop-up mechanism called moving arms, I guess. So you have two pieces of paper one over the other, and you put the mechanism in between them, and then when you open it like this an arm comes out…. And then when you close the pieces of paper back together again the arm goes back inside. Maybe we could do something with that, like a little hand thing, and make a coin vanish, or something like that?
Enjoy the full, hour-long conversation with Jeki and Blake, and other episodes on Blake Vogt’s Inventing Magic podcast.
