Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Since quite a lot of them are, that seems like a wise assumption.
Brown is a magician. It’s his job to fool the audience. He’s quite open about the fact that his stuff is all trickery, patter, misdirection and simple psychology tricks used to make money in the entertainment biz. He’s not pretending to really be magical or to be in it for the greater good. If you sit back and admire his skills as a showman you realize how damned good at it he is.
I wrote this up (before the ‘revelation’) as a short Sherlock Holmes pastiche at http://tinyurl.com/l2j8y4 .
The follow-up show lost DB a lot of respect in my eyes.
That’s the thing though. I used to think he was a good showman. But resorting to cheap camera tricks is not the work of a good showman. IMHO, the mark of a good illusion is that it can be done right in front of a live audience, or (better) one-on-one with the “victim”.
I agree with parts of what casdave is saying. He doesn’t really move, nor say a single word while the numbers are being called. It has occurred to me that the live lotto broadcast could actually be superimposed on a prerecorded scene: the image on the monitor screen looks a little bit too perfect to have been filmed live - though of course I have no idea how that would benefit the trick.
As an aside, that “fake” handheld look was also really obvious on NYPD Blue (steadicam with the cameraman jerking it around, or tripod mounted?). Once I noticed it, I couldn’t watch the program any more - as opposed to Homicide: Life on the Street where it clearly was a genuine handheld they were using.
I think that once camera tricks are an option, the audience doesn’t have much of a chance. What’s stopping him from using something off-camera to help him with the trick, such as a signaling accomplice, for instance.
Anyone here know what a split screen is? That it is possible, in a video control room, to combine two images, one for the left half of the screen, one for the right, with a blend in the middle which is absolutely invisible? Duck soup for a video function.
Here’s my take on it. First, the camera shake was artifically added and the camera, during most of the show, was firmly mounted (the cutaway to the distant camera was misdirection). As soon as Darren moved to the TV, the video mixer wiped across half the screen. The left half was from a previously recorded freeze frame or video feed, the right half, live.
The real balls and rack are now not seen by the viewing audience. They are seeing the recording or freeze frame, so a technician can step up to the balls without being seen, remove the blank balls, and as the numbers are announced, replace them with the correctly numbered balls from a bin. As soon as the tech is done and leaves, the screen wipe can now be reversed and the left side of the screen is live. Evidence of this can be seen due to the tech’s slight error, and the left ball is not well seated, so appears to jump up when the wipe is done.
Now we are 100% live. All Darren has to do is walk over to the balls and turn them around to show they match the card.
Note that this would not work with a studio audience, and there was none.
Apparently the first page of this thread has been ingeniously hidden behind a split screen! 
A $200 video editor has a “soft wipe” function controlled by a lever, just one of many effects. The lever can be moved from one side to the other, controlling the amount of video source #1 (in this case a freeze frame) and video source #2 (the live action with Darren and the TV) goes to the output. The operator moved the slider just enough to cover the action taking place at the balls. There’s no need for anything to “line up”, a line on the wall, or anything else. “Soft” means the edges are blended seamlessly instead of a hard line or some other gimmick.
It’s very simple, requires no special equipment not already available in a studio, and techs know how to do it. Any other method would be much more complicated.
One idea about why Darren stopped talking was that the entire studio audio feed was muted to avoid accidentally picking up sounds of the balls being placed or moved. That sounds like a reasonable explanation; just a precaution. What if a tech dropped a ball?
“Too perfect”? What did you expect? You do know that it is possible to sync a camera to the TV so the horizontal scroll bars you so often see do not happen?
Sure, it might have been superimposed, but that’s the hard way, with no benefit I can see.
There is a YouTube video (sorry, don’t have the link) that shows Darren’s show side by side with the raw Lotto feed to show that his show was in real time, and they match. No broadcast delay is needed to do this trick.
Amazing! Please tell me more! applauds
Makes sense. It would have been pure TV gold if the assistant had got the shakes under pressure and dropped the whole lot, so that suddenly loads of bouncing balls started appearing ghost-like from behind the split-screen, like a Sony Bravia ad. Wish it had happened. 
I’m surprised at how readily everyone (including the majority of the media) is willing to dismiss the idea that it was fixed in the way he described in the closing minutes of the program. Obviously the maths is nonsense, so that can be discounted. Between that and genuinely fixing the lottery, there is camera trickery. I doubt it was a split-screen or any other camera trick; it’s too cheap. If anyone’s familiar with his previous stuff, they’ll surely know that one of his main selling points is his honesty. His tricks are often revealed to us, genuinely. I really doubt he’d resort to something like a split-screen, it’d be easy and worthless. Fixing the lottery is, however, while not exactly magic, a pretty incredible feat; a feat, I believe, he could’ve pulled off.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Camelot (the company that runs the lottery) are surpressing news of their alarm (and media coverage of the incident that doesn’t focus on the bogus maths) because it would, of course, look terrible for the company. For these reasons also, they wouldn’t consider prosecuting Derren Brown.
You think there is more chance that the lottery was fixed (the implications of which could be absolutely huge) and a stage magician using a trick? I think you need to sort out the probabilities a bit better.
I do indeed think there is more chance of Derren Brown fixing the lottery than using a split-screen (or any other camera trick).
Why would he, after making a career out of being fairly forthcoming in his techniques, in generally explaining how his illusions were created or how he manipulates people in whatever way, suddenly make a complete switch in style from honest and sceptical illusionist to David Copperfield-style camera trickery? The point is that he’s not any old ‘stage magician’, his angle is antithetical to cheap and flashy magic.
Maybe I’m being naive over this. If anyone has evidence he’s pulled a similarly cheap stunt in the past, then I’ll happily rethink my conclusion.
As to the implications of lottery fixing, as I previously implied, if they chose to prosecute him - thereby admitting that the lottery can indeed be fixed - it would be more harmful to them than him. If they instead ignore it and put it down to mere trickery - and in the process secure their reputation - then they would benefit to a much greater degree than if they were to have one man imprisoned.
This is a whoosh, right? I pointed out that a $200 video editor can do the trick legally and simply, and you postulate that hundreds of people are on his payroll, perpetuating fraud on the entire country and opening themselves to prosecution and civil or criminal penalties if any one of them squeals? And the people who recorded the show live side-by-side with Derren’s feed in real time also were in on it? Or of the millions of viewers who watched, and thousands of viewers who might have flipped channels during the live show, not one of them reported a suspicious 20 second difference?
Then why wouldn’t he reveal the numbers before they were drawn, producing an impressive illusion rather than the pedestrian “see, I knew what they were all along!” crap he pulled?
What **Musicat *said. You are being naive. I’m not saying that Brown necessarily used a video trick, it might well be something fancy to do with the stand the balls were sitting on, or even more likely some other trick about which I have no clue. But plenty of magicians earn their living by relying on you thinking that their method of doing the trick is so cheap and underhanded that they wouldn’t lower themselves to do it.
*I say this without any sense of animosity or ill feeling: it’s all part of the fun
I think that the idea that anyone could influence which lottery balls are produced is, frankly, ludicrous. As has been said, the number of people who would have to be in on it would be huge. In addition the machine would have to have been tampered with. Camelot have a number of lottery machines, one of which is chosen at ramdom by a member of the public for each draw.
As there don’t seem to be any other methods of doing it, I’m left with the conclusion that it was some form of camera trickery. In that case, it does seem that the “method of doing the trick is so cheap and underhanded” that my respect for Derren Brown has plummeted. To make it even worse, all that guff about the power of the crowd was pathetic.
While I agree that this stunt was more David Copperfield than his usual style, he certainly does use plain old conjuring tricks all the time, as well as self-working tricks such as the horse racing tips, the mirror chess, and the ten heads in a row. Those are the only ones he explains honestly. Take the Russian Roulette stunt – I don’t know how he did it, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t actually involve firing a loaded gun at his head, even one loaded with blanks. He’s a good actor, though, and can do a convincing job of looking nervous and unsure, which I think helps to persuade people that he just maybe does have special powers or something.