Help Fund The Magic Documentary 'When The Magic Happens'

One of my interests outside of film has always been Magic (an art which I think goes hand in hand with the mastery of storytelling and incorporation of visual effects in films). In the past years there have been a wave of great magic documentaries — Make Believe (from the producers of King of Kong), The Magic Life, and Magic Camp (which I have yet to see, but have heard good things about).

When The Magic Happens is being produced by the team behind HBO's Emmy-nominated doc Superheroes. It "follows the ups and downs of several world-class magicians who are making a living at the art they love." The filmmakers have been given incredible access to The Magic Castle, an Los Angeles landmark which love (someday I hope to become a member). Their goal is only $30,000 and they have 22 days to reach it. If you pledge money, some of the rewards are very cool including a tour of the Magic Castle with Max Maven, a one-on-one magic lesson with Jon Armstrong, a trip to the film festival premiere and more.

Watch the trailer embedded after the jump, and help kickstart this documentary at this link.

We've always loved trying to expose great artists and filmmakers to larger audiences. Years ago I began a daily post called VOTD, which stands for Video of the Day, which featured cool short films, commercials or videos from around the web. I loved the feature because it let me expose the world to some of the lesser known short filmmakers and commercial directors. As it become popular, we began to get a ton of submissions. Sadly, for every good video we watched over one hundred bad ones. Eventually good material started to dry up and we found that we could no longer keep publishing videos daily. We still get a couple dozen submissions a day (probably now more in hopes of landing in Page 2), but not nearly as many as we use to.

Today it seems we get equally as many submissions for Kickstarters and Indiegogo fundraiser projects to help a film get made. We thought about running a weekly Kickstarter feature, but other sites are already doing that. We try to feature the few that truly excite us, but it is a very small percentage. This is a really long-winded way of saying that I really believe this one could be a great documentary film, and it could use your help.