Derren's balls / new ACAS video

citizenpaul's picture

So Derren Brown managed to correctly predict six out of six balls in this week's Wednesday lottery draw. It was a great little show and I'm a big fan of his material - particularly because he freely admits that it was all a trick, and he's going to reveal how it was done tonight. There seem to be two main theories floating around the net as to how it was done:

  1. Some kind of split-screen camera-trickery editing job whereby the left-hand side of the screen was pre-recorded/still but the right-hand side was live with Derren talking and gesticulating, etc. As the lottery balls came out, one of his minions put the corresponding ones out on the rack unseen by the viewing audience – with a subsequent wipe edit to then enable Derren to walk onto the other side of the screen to reveal them. The problem with this theory is that the camera was moving the whole time, being handheld... this would make it impossible to edit the two feeds together seamlessly...
  2. They used some kind of programmable balls upon which the numbers were printed after the live draw...

Judge for yourself below:

Some bloody idiots are also claiming that he must have filmed all the possible combinations of the draw prior to the event (similar to the coin-toss trick he's done previously)... Quite how he'd have found the time or money to film 14 million versions of the draw I don't know (if he did 10 versions a day, everyday, it would take nearly 4000 years!).

Option 1 seems the most plausible to me - guess we'll find out tonight. The subject of camera wizardry also links into current ACAS goings on. At the moment, we're planning the promo video to accompany the next new song to be released, which is entitled Green Scenery. Ross will probably post an update on this shortly, but we want to do something slightly different to the last two promos, which will involve some special ultrafast frame rate camera gear... over to you Ross.