Derren Brown Lottery Prediction – How He Did It
Last night on channel four I watched Derren Brown do the impossible and predict the national lottery results as they were being drawn live on BBC1. If you didn’t get to see it, I’ve found it on YouTube for you:
It’s a pretty impressive feat? I’m not so sure. Obviously Derren doesn’t posses psychic powers and he will be the first person to admit this. Derren has said that he will reveal how he performed the “trick” on Friday at 9pm on channel 4, but if you engage a few of the braincells it doesn’t seem too difficult to figure out IMO.
What I didn’t like about the “trick” was that the prediction was made after the balls were revealed. Well yes, it’s not too difficult to predict something after they’ve already been revealed now is it. This effect would have been 100000000% better had Derren said these are going to be the numbers…. before they were drawn. The excuse that “legally the BBC / national lottery has the right to be the first to reveal the numbers” doesn’t stand up in my eyes. This coming from the man who set up an entire show in a supposedly secret location in order to broadcast a game of Russian roulette live…. since when has there been a law that says somebody can’t say “I think today’s national lottery numbers will be….”.
No audience. OK, if Derren can’t broadcast the numbers prior to them being drawn, why not fill that building with 10,000 people and predict to them beforehand what the numbers will be and record it, this could have then be played back afterwards with 10,000 witnesses that he got it correct. The excuse “we’re doing this alone so nobody can benefit” again doesn’t stand up. You cannot buy a national lottery ticket after 7.30pm is my understanding. That gives plenty of time to do the prediction and there’s no way his live audience would have been able to benefit.
Why if your going to predict the lottery numbers wouldn’t you buy a ticket? Camelot banned you? Are you seriously telling me Mystic Meg is banned from playing the lottery? No, shes not. Derren could have simply donated any winnings to charity or distributed his share himself to any other winners that day, which would have been acceptable.
So i’m not overly impressed, but regardless of this, lets look at how he may have achieved the effect:
The speculated solution is that there is a delay between the BBC1 show and the channel 4 show, meaning there’s plenty of time to temper with the balls, there is a lot of speculation amongst the Internet forums that every live screening has to have a 20 second delay at least in order to edit out any major happenings (like death). This however can easily be proven wrong by comparing the screenings of the two shows in a split screen as seen below. if there’s any delay, it’s less than a second.
If we look at it logically, from the moment the balls are revealed on the screen to the moment Derren reveals his predictions, there is exactly 30 seconds, in which time all you have to figure out is how he printed the numbers on the balls.
Anyone ever seen one of them stands before? Have one in your home? The biggest mistake magicians make IMO is to use “props” that just arn’t familiar to the world. We all know there’s something dodgy about them, that see through column holding the stand up could have contained a mirror, hiding the balls being shot up into hollow shells that were displayd at the top. Take a close look at the balls, there’s a nice groove in each of them which is unnatural.
The print could have been achieved using light based paints / lasers, this seems to be the general consensus of the discussion forums, that stand could have held any sort of technology.
The most obvious solution is camera trickery, freezing half the screen, demonstrated in the following video:
Derren will on Friday more then likely tell us that he’s studied the lottery numbers that have been drawn since it began and has found the most likely outcome of numbers based on more than 10 years data and now he’ll know them every week from here on in …. yep, sure you did.
But this isn’t a completely negative post, because Derren did indeed produce some magic on channel 4. Derren took over channel 4, more 4, e4, film 4 and any other of 4′s channels as well as all the +1 coverage for 10 minutes.
Derren ran a number of ads for over 2 weeks prior to the show again across all channels.
His PR machine went into overdrive with nearly all major newspapers / TV magazines /news websites covering the show before and after last nights performance.
Derren’s blog was inaccessible for hours after the show last night, something his technical team will have to learn from but demonstrating the popularity of the show. A quick search shows that the discussion forums have gone into overdrive debating how he performed the effect.
Quite simply the brand marketing / PR coverage that Derren has achieved is undoubtedly magic, and a lot of brands could learn from this, buzz marketing at its best.
September 11th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
[...] following on from my last post I thought it might be fun to talk aboutwhat Derren is telling us right now live on channel 4, in [...]