Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
kalmar wrote:
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.
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 himself and selection of numbers clear, and switch feeds.
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.
Grim... wrote:
Maybe - the balls would shift when they unlocked the left of the screen though, wouldn't there?
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.
Grim... wrote:
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.
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.
Quote:
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?
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.