Slow cross-fade (or whatever they call it in the biz), to smooth over the transition? I also suspect that they blend the edge between the two sections of the split screen. Looks like that on the YouTube reconstruction that that guy did.
Here is the YouTube reconstruction. Nice work.
I was looking at a newspaper article about this today, and in the screenshot I noticed that there is a handy vertical line right the way down the background that they could use as a seam. Notice how there’s a vertical line on the wall behind the TV that exactly lines up with the left-hand edge of the TV screen (the actual TV picture, that is, not the casing of the TV set). It’s kind of hard to see in the dark of the YouTube video, but the screenshot in the paper showed it well (not that they highlighted it or anything - just my observation).
You can see it [- note that perfect vertical line. I think they lined up the edge of the TV screen with the “wall line”, as this makes it less obvious than having the edge of the TV perfectly aligned. Also, the edge of the TV picture is an “artificial” edge, so having a sharp line wouldn’t look odd.
As for the ball “gradually” moving up, I agree that a slow fade is more likely. A sudden jump would attract more attention.
Lance Burton did something similar with a split screen when he pretended to [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOA6lLnJxmw]escape from the path of a roller coaster](How did he do THAT? Derren Brown predicts winning lottery numbers... and he'll reveal his method on Friday | Daily Mail Online) (YouTube video). His was less convincing, though, and you can see a significant jump where his shadow disappears from the tracks before the coaster comes through. (Also he fails to cast a shadow on the coaster, which he ought to if he was really there.)
Sorry, messed up the link.
Which is of course also easy to do, a couple different ways: 1) After the lottery, just scan newspapers from Wednesday until you find a page that randomly has the right numbers. Announce that your magic made it happen.
2) Sneak say 20 different numbers onto a whole bunch of pages (pages 6, 7, and 13 of the Daily Mail; pages 2, 4, 9, and 12 of the Post, etc.). After the lottery look at your list to find the page that has the lottery numbers. Announce that page (don’t mention the others). Assume people will ignore the non-lottery numbers on that page.
So, the reveal show has just been on and… interesting. Not at all what I was expecting.
[spoiler]Alledgedly it was done through making use of the supposed tendency of groups to make more accurate decisons than individuals working alone, first identified by Francis Galton, the Wisdom of Crowds phenomenon.
Or maybe, by fixing the lottery machine using an insider.[/spoiler]
I have to watch this again to work it through, I think.
ISTM that they revealed that they don’t like to reveal how their “magic” works.
Exactly. The explanation quoted above is bogus.
He says he did it by the wisdom of crowds… obviously bunk.
He says he might have fixed the machine… obviously not, serious jail time for that, plus via this method, he would have “known” the numbers in advance, and hence been able to use a far more convincing “reveal” once the numbers were drawn.
Tonight’s special has done nothing to take away from the front-running theory… use of split screen. I don’t live in the UK and hence couldn’t watch, I’ve only been able to watch the small bits posted on YouTube. I’d like to know if Brown addressed the split screen speculation, other than the quick mention of it during his intro?
I know it’s too easy to say, but the camera wobble just isn’t natural-looking - it really does look like an after effect for two reasons:
-It’s quite angular and almost formulaic - a little move up, then down, a little move to the left, then right. Natural camera wobbles are more ‘organic’ than this.
-Even though the movement in frame is slight, it doesn’t look like what you’d get when a camera wobbles - because when a camera wobbles, it affects the angle at which you see objects in the shot - but what we’re seeing looks like a picture sliding about laterally and vertically in a loose frame - there are no parallax effects.
The only way he could have convinced me is to have bought a ticket and won the jackpot.
He didn’t address the split screen other than in a list of possible theories during the intro. I really enjoyed the fact that the people in the ‘focus group’ clearly believed they’d done it, and were overjoyed at the result. I agree that last night didn’t give the real explanation but I think he even does the ‘mis-directed explanation’ better than most others, so I love that as a part of the whole. I really don’t need the truth about santa, although I get that other people like getting it.
The thing that gets me about the camera shake is how unnecessary it was, unless to disguise somerhing. Why would they use a handheld camera for an essentially static scene?
I agree about the camera shake. I’ve watched it a few times now, and it looks totally artificial. The camera moves left, then is totally stationary for a short time, then moves down, then is stationary again, and so on. It’s just not how a hand-held camera moves.
I stopped watching yesterday’s “reveal” show after 20 minutes when it became clear it was just going to be full of bogus nonsense. The wisdom of crowds thing - do me a favour. Yes, it works well for **predictable *results - for example, the odds created by thousands of punters on Betfair (or other betting exchanges) on football matches, horse races and so on tend to be VERY accurate. But for a lottery? Nonsense.
Using camera trickery as the basis of this spurious show is just rubbish. I like Brown’s illusions, when they are ACTUALLY illusions. He’s lost a lot of my respect with this stunt.
*And again, you can only judge accuracy of gambling odds by looking at the big picture, not isolated results. Over the whole football season, Betfair odds are very accurate - if you backed any outcome at random in each match, you would break even more or less over the season, apart from the commission and overround. But you can’t use the “wisdom of crowds” to say that result X WILL happen in a given match.
He also did a ridiculously obvious “trick” which he said “shows the importance of having people cheering for you”.
He listed the 8 possible combinations of a coin flipped three times:
HHH, HHT, HTH, HTT, THH, THT, TTH, TTT
He got one bloke to choose which combination he wanted to opt for. He went for HHH. Brown then said, OK, my team will go for THH.
The HHH bloke was on his own. The girl using Derren’s THH combination had a whole team of cheerleaders rooting for her.
So the coin was flipped, alternately by each person, until one person’s combination came up, but (and this is the insanely stupid part) THEY USED JUST A SINGLE STRING OF THROWS FOR BOTH PLAYERS.
So were we meant to be impressed that THH beat HHH by about 10 throws to 2?
Any idiot with the slightest common sense can see that, unless the first three flips are all heads, then the only way you can get HHH to appear is to start off with THH, so the other player will ALREADY have won.
HHH could only ever win if the first three flips are all heads - a 1 in 8 chance. In ALL other cases, THH will win. I said this to my wife before they even started the ridiculous demonstration. Then we switched channels.
He must think his audience are utterly dumb.
I had a similar reaction to a performance by “The Amazing Kreskin” at my college once. He was billing himself as a mentalist with amazing psychic powers at that time, don’t know if he changed his title to magician later or what.
Anyway, he offered as his second or third demonstation of his ‘psychic power’ to predict what the sum of a column of randomly chosen 8-digit numbers were. Random, as an audience member would get to create one of the numbers and then HE would write down the next, and repeat a pre-set number of times. :rolleyes:
Sorry, I cannot believe for one minute in a psychic who resorts to ordinary mathematical ‘tricks.’
Kreskin is a hack of the highest order. Back in October 2000, he told Howard Stern he would predict the winner of the election ahead of time - he gave Howard an envelope that he claimed had the name of the winner in it. After the election (and IIRC they had to delay his appearance a few times because of the recount), he came back on, and they opened the sealed envelope. It had four symbols on it. Kreskin then pulled a sheet out of his pocket that “translated” the symbols into B-U-S-H. Lucky for him he didn’t accidently bring the translation sheet that spelled G-O-R-E, huh?
I can’t possibly be the only one who’s brought up the idea of a trap door and assistant under the stand, can I? Mirrors, etc., masking the movement of the balls (except the one that jiggles?? It just seems so obvious to me.
It would probably have been a bit more impressive if the sucker team had chosen a sequence other than HHH, but what you’re describing is also known as Penney’s Game. It’s somewhat famous as a probability game, and useful as a bar bet. No matter what sequence the first player choses, the second player can choose a sequence which is more likely.
If the first player choses [1][2][3] then the second player should choose [-2][1][2]. So the table of optimal choices is as follows:
Player 1 Player 2 Odds P2 wins
HHH THH 7:1
HHT THH 3:1
HTH HHT 2:1
HTT HHT 2:1
THH TTH 2:1
THT TTH 2:1
TTH HTT 3:1
TTT HTT 7:1
Player 2 always has an advantage, they win the game at least 2 out of every 3 plays. Obviously choosing HHH or TTT is stupid, for exactly the reason you stated, but every other choice is almost as bad.
If the THH team only one 10 games out of 12, they were actually doing a little worse than expected. Of course, the sample size is way too small to conclude anything, but it does suggest that having a legion of cheering fans might not be the optimal choice for your next trip to Vegas.
To be fair, Brown did explain that after the trick, to show that it was nothing to do any psychic effect of the cheerleaders. But he then built that up into some bollocks about mathematics finding patterns in random numbers, and that’s how he could get a group of people to predict the lottery.
I think the vast majority of this was prerecorded, you don’t actually see him writing the numbers down at any stage. What you see is him appearing to write something, and his hand movements are incredibly quick, they almost look speeded up, and in particualr, when he write the 11 he seems to be making a circle, the numbers he states do not match the movements of his hand doing the writing.
If he had actually written down the numbers, why didn’t he stay where he was and turn his board around?
If you notice, there is a jump in movement just as he turns off the monitor.That’s when he makes the switch with his board.
Why did he need to turn off the monitor at all? He had to do it because most of it was prerecorded with a blank screen, and the lottery draw was then cut onto it.
Thing is, he can’t walk past the image, becuause it isn’t on the monitor at all, so he pretends to turn the monitor off.
This balls can be done by using two cameras, seen Penn and Teller use this to make a bulldozer dissappear, look on the bricks pattern behind him there is an vertical change in colour on the bricks where they are very slightly lighter in shade. You can see this best if you freeze the image just as he has the balls turned half way around.
Besides, if this has taken a years work, don’t you think he would have needed to write those numbers down at all? Surely he would have them in memory by now. He would not be at all uncertain of the balls stored on the rack because he would know exactly what was on them.
The rack that holds the balls simply lifts off, someone filled up that rack as they were being announced and mounted it on the stand, his writing of the numbers was just a ruse to gain enough time for this to happen.
Wow, and I read part of his book that claimed he was just using the psychic powers latent in everyone. I mean, I didn’t believe he was right, but I thought that maybe he believed it himself, although probably it was just a cover for his act. But your description is of a really bad act. I thought he was better than that. Has anyone seen him do some good stuff?