Be Excellent To Each Other

That one seemed trickier, and relies on being able to accurately memorise all of the pegs... and since there are a ton, it's gonna hurt the brain and take a while to go in. I'll wait until the next time I'm watching cricket all day to have a go at remembering it.

has anyone seen Derren Brown is going to predict the lottery numbers live this evening! 10:35, all '4' channels apparently!

As predicting the lottery numbers is impossible, I'm thinking he's got something else up his sleeve.

No, it isn't.

It's predicting them accurately that's impossible

It's not live. It's a recording of a live show.

As well as the Derran Brown trick there's also a new Jonathan Meades series starting on BBC 4 at 21:00. His stuff is always worth watching too.

anyone just see derren brown predict the lottery?

So Derren Brown just predicted the lottery numbers correctly.

Really?

Yes

And he'll show us how to do it on friday.

That's his 10million viewers sorted for friday night then

Can't be real though, it's on tv innit.


And they'd only get a pound each anyway, the muppets.

if he spent a year doing it, it's probably just probability

No he didn't.

i think he had a writing recognition on the board he wrote on, that made them appear on the balls, imagine an awkward version of writing on D.Kawasakis Brain Training on the DS.

You know what I mean. We all know it's a trick, but the impressiveness is in how it is done.

I love Derren Brown but taped it all, so will chuck that on tomorrow night.

Too hard - he'd have just had someone type the numbers in off-screen.
The magic was in the ping-pong balls, for sure. Otherwise he'd have turned them around before the draw started.

He's such a marvellous showman, and the idea to do this kind of thing, where he pulls a stunt like this and then shows you how a couple of days later, is marketing GOLD.

I can't see that derren brown thing on iplayer, any clues?

Try Channel 4.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmxua_V1AcM
C4 / BBC1 simulcast.


This is very true. However, this time, I'm not convinced we're going to get the real answer.
"I used clever ping-pong balls" isn't going to be that impressive. How long is the show on Friday?

[edit]An hour. Hmm.

Just watched it on youtube.

There's no "studio audience" in his 10 minute show, is there? Not in the clip I saw anyway.

So it's easy - the left side of the screen is genlocked or digitally replaced with a static picture of the stand and ping-pong balls, meanwhile an assistant rushes out and puts the right numbers in the holder, hidden from view. As soon as he's finished and has scarpered, they switch back to the full camera view and Derren reveals it.

Nice trick. There's no way he's going to admit that's how he did it either.

There are some great "solutions" on Youtube already.




I bet Camelot are paying him for this stunt as it might get people interested in the lottery again. (only the gullible)

Maybe - the balls would shift when they unlocked the left of the screen though, wouldn't there?

Most till receipts use thermal paper, so to print on it you fire a laser at it, and it darkens, I think the simplest way of doing last night's stunt would be to have some sort of thermal paper like surface on the balls, and a laser, that would take mere seconds.

Malc

There's 25 seconds for the chap to write the numbers, but the camera is moving slightly all time, so I don't think that's it.

I like Malc's laser idea, but wouldn't we see the laser picking up on bits of dust?

You have barely 25 seconds between the last ball being drawn and Derren doing the reveal. That's not a lot of time to get the bloke to write all six numbers down, get clear, and switch feeds.

Anyway, I reject all camera trickery explanations. Brown is too good a showman for Friday night to be any sort of anticlimax; he has to have up his sleeve some insanely clever explanation of how he did this or the Friday show is going to be crap. Assuming he does, why would he then do the actual trick with camera trickery instead of the insane cleverness?

I didn't actually watch this.. but maybe he.. like you know.. just guessed?

Wouldn't that be something!

Who has to write anything? He just has to pull the balls out of a rack and place them in the holder as the TV announcer reads them coming out of the lottery machine. Plenty of time to do that and then get himself and selection of balls off the stage, because Derren spends extra time writing them on a whiteboard while they're doing the summing up.



Well, they're sitting pretty snugly in that holder, I don't see them moving much even when he spins the thing around to do the reveal.



The camera moving is purely to make you think that (and it's moving about suspiciously much, as if to emphasise that, wouldn't you say chinny?) - but it's not difficult to do technically - even an old greenscreen setup lets you move the camera.

Notice how, through the whole scene where he's watching the TV, the frame wobbles about but never changes zoom nor does the cameraman move. That's definitely a clue that it's really a fixed camera and they're adding the wobble for effect.



Because there's no way he could have known the numbers in advance. Occams razor. The clever explanation will be clever, but it's not going to be true or repeatable.

If Friday's show doesn't leave every viewer smacking their head and saying "of course! dammit!" then it will have failed, and if it's not repeatable and obviously true it won't do that.

Well, let's wait and see
I think you might be disappointed though...

But he often does exactly just that, comes up with some amazing explanation of how it's done, but has really used an altogether more mundane reason. Some have said that's his biggest misdirection. He makes you think he's done some massively complicated thing, when "all" he's done is some sleight of hand (an ear piece on his arm rather than in his ear for example...)

Malc

Did he not say he'd show us so we too would be able to do it?

Or you think that was just patter?

Where "it" is "predicting" the outcome of the lottery 30 seconds after it's been announced, yes.

Yes but I meant that the answer wouldn't be freeze framing or green screen as that is not something the general public "can do"

It probably is though. Camcorder, greenscreen software, what's the big deal? Why you'd want to bother is another matter.

As Malc says, it'll certainly look cleverer than this in the Friday show, but I pretty much guarantee that's how it was done.

It's like The Prestige ZOMG!!!

(That was a class film btw)

Surely derren brown just used smoke and mirrors to do it.

The balls looked suspect (the printing on them)

But the program wil probably be 30mins telling us what the lottery is.
20mins of him "planning" his trick
30 seconds of him telling us he faked the whole thing.
Audience goes "WTF" and he's proved to be the devil

Correct.


Nah, nothing that elaborate.


Correct.
But the audience is the same suckers who buy lottery tickets so they should be used to being scammed, frankly.

I reckon that it wasn't a live broadcast and he just did 14 million takes, then they just superimposed the telly footage from the other channel.

Sure, 14 million 8-minute long recordings wouldn't take long to do

Even if you think they top-and-tailed some generic intro footage, you'd still need a couple of minutes recorded uniquely for each set of balls he wanted to predict. And if you consider he only promised to get five of the six numbers, that's still over 56,000 combinations. It's just too much.

That's completely ludicrous. My way is better

He beat the devil in a Fiddle battle.

The adverts did say he'd spent a year working on it.

Showmanship. Not true. Never believe anything you see on the TV, especially adverts.

The trick with Derren Brown is that you can't trust anything he ever says, especially when he swears to god he isn't lying. I think a lot of people would be a bit disappointed if they knew just how cheap most of his tricks are.

It's the greatest trick the devil never played.

Oh, awesome, it's on youtube

Respectively: I know, I know, I don't, I agree. It was a bad joke thingy!

I have to say, I really, really like Derren Brown's stuff. He's just a proper, old school, entertaining magician. I know there's probably all sorts of cheap tricks he uses to pull off these stunts, but it's all done with such entertaining panache that I rather enjoy it all.

Me too. The mind-reading (face-reading) stuff and hypnosis he does is incredible.