This is the first piece in a new series on the lesfrenchtwins.com blog. Tony and Jordan, in their own words, on what actually happened in the rooms where the duo's career was decided. No press kit version. No agency rewrite. Memory, footage, and what we wrote in our notebooks at the time.

The week before

We landed in Los Angeles on the Tuesday. The audition was Friday. Three days. We were sharing a single hotel room in a Best Western near LAX because the AGT travel budget was real but the AGT travel budget was not luxurious. We had not slept on the flight. We had checked the LED screens at customs three separate times because in 2017 nobody had any idea what to do with what we were carrying. The screens arrived intact. Both of them.

We had been preparing the act for six months. The technical setup was, at that point, the most complicated thing either of us had ever built. Two synchronized LED panels, a custom playback system that we had wired in Jordan's apartment in the 11th arrondissement, and a routine that required us to move on exact beats because the visual effect was time-coded to within four frames.

Four frames. At twenty-four frames per second. That is sixteen hundredths of a second of margin.

We had rehearsed the act over a hundred times in the lead-up. We were also, we will be honest, terrified.

The morning of the audition

Pasadena Civic Auditorium. The line of acts waiting backstage went around an entire hallway. We were, if memory serves, the forty-second act of the day. The act before us was a singer. The act after us was a contortionist. We watched two acts get the four-X rejection. One of them was a magician.

The producers came to find us about ninety minutes before our slot. They wanted to check the cabling one more time. The AGT stage power had failed for another act earlier in the week and they were being careful. We walked them through the patch. They were polite. They were also visibly skeptical, which we understood, because at that point in 2017 the format we were proposing did not have a category name. We were just two French guys with screens.

One of the producers, who we would later get to know well, said something we still quote. She said, in English, that whatever this was, it had better work. Then she smiled. Then she walked away.

The five minutes on stage

You can rewatch the routine on YouTube. The uploads of that audition have been watched by tens of millions of people. What you cannot see on any upload is what was happening in our heads in those five minutes.

For the first ninety seconds, we both thought the LED screen on Jordan's side was going to fail. It did not. The audio playback skipped one frame at the forty-three second mark and we both caught it because we had heard the same skip during the dress rehearsal that morning. It was small enough that the judges did not notice, but we both did. We pushed the timing forward by a sixteenth of a second on the next cue and the routine recovered. Nobody in the audience saw anything.

The third act of the routine, the one where Tony walks through the screen and Jordan reappears, requires the camera angle to be tight on the right edge of the panel. The AGT camera operator that night, a veteran whose name we never learned, held the angle for exactly the duration we needed. We did not direct him. He chose to hold it. We owe a lot of the impact of that moment to one man whose name we do not know.

The words Simon Cowell said

You can hear them on the recording, but we want to write them down anyway because we have replayed them often enough.

He called us the best digital illusionists. It is the sentence that has followed us ever since, the one on our press kit, and the phrase digital illusionists has become, in the years since, the name we work under. We owe the christening to that moment.

What came next

The four yes votes hit us in a sequence we still remember. Howie first. Mel B second. Heidi third. Simon last. The four-X-yes was the kind of result you cannot prepare for emotionally. We hugged each other on stage. We hugged Howie when he came down. We did not say anything coherent in the post-cut interview. The producers had to do six takes of the post-audition reaction because we kept cracking.

The next morning we got a wave of booking inquiries on our personal email, which at the time was an unprotected Gmail. Within a week the first agencies in Paris and London had reached out. Within two months we had performed at the Cartier private gala in Monaco, which was the first engagement of what would become our corporate calendar. By the end of 2017 the category had a name and our calendar had a shape.

None of that would have happened if the audio had skipped twice instead of once.

Nine years later

Our AGT run ended at the Judge Cuts that summer. It did not matter. The audition had already changed everything. We had reached the final of La France a un Incroyable Talent on M6 in 2016. Since AGT, we have performed on Britain's Got Talent: The Ultimate Magician in 2022 and reached the final of Tu Si Que Vales in Italy in 2023.

The corporate calendar has, in the years since, included IBM Think, Salesforce Dreamforce, Bloomberg Tech, Chanel private dinners on the Place Vendôme, Christian Louboutin advertising work, Cartier galas in Monaco, Lancôme launches at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris, and a roster of private engagements we cannot name because of NDAs. The fee structure has moved a long way from the early Paris cabaret nights. That trajectory is unusual in our business. We are aware of that.

What stays with us, nine years later, is the camera operator who held the angle. The producer who said it had better work. The Howie Mandel handshake after the votes. The Best Western in LAX. The hundred hours of rehearsal. The four frames of margin.

The rest is what people see. This was what we remember.

Next in the series: the night we performed for Will Smith and what he said to us afterward. Coming next week.