A few key things he's said and done that make me think this; it took upwards of a year of his life, apparently, to set this up. It's obviously not a small scale thing. Also, the trick itself only took place in a 10 minute program, in a somewhat low budget (for Derren Brown) setting.
I'm in no way certain this is how he himself did it, but if I were him; this is how I would have done it.
He could, quite easily, if not quickly, film himself performing the exact same section of flipping the numbered balls around over and over again, for every potential combination of numbers. Initially that seems quite a dauntingly massive task, but, otherwise, fairly easy, and perhaps not so mindnumbingly tricky if he were to spread out the thousands of predictions minutes he would have to do over a long period of time (say, a few years). To clarify, I mean the actual sections leading up to and including the lottery draw, but the final part, as he flips the balls around. Clearly some skillful camera switching would have to take place for this to work.
There are a couple of arguments to this, most notably the live feed from the television beside him. If he filmed this 5 months ago, say, he couldn't have rigged the television to play the same images of 5 months in the future. Well, I can think of at least one way around this. One would be to perform the camera switch from the "live" part of the programme where he writes the numbers and watches the television (and all before) and the "prerecorded" section, where he reveals his prediction, cannily taken from an archive of the stock of prerecordings of different lottery 'predictions' filmed over the course of his years of work.
Of course, there are a couple of phenomenal flaws in this; camera switching is by no means easy to make flow between two films, particularly under the relentless scrutiny that is the Internet, and it's an awful lot of effort to go to for what is essentially a very cheap camera trick. I always envisaged Derren to go for something a bit more... grand.
That's my die cast, anywho. It's a potential way of doing it, in my opinion.
there's another 5 to go of his eventssss.
ReplyDeleteHmm you could be right about the recording the lil bit where he flips the numbers and such, but the t.v playing the lottery numbers in the background was a live feed, you could switch between the channels to watch it.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite believable he would do it that way, despite the enormity of the task, on the show afterwards he demonstrated that he had spent 4 months learning the entire A-Z map of London off by heart, so yeah, he's insane.