How Derren Brown predicted the Lottery
September 9th, 2009 at 23:44
I’m posting this now on the off-chance that I’m right. Then I’ll be able to boast about being brilliant at figuring things out. If you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, earlier on Derren Brown “predicted” the lottery result live on TV – and got all six numbers.
Obviously, to rule a few things out, it couldn’t have been a delay or a pre-record as Camelot lottery rules are tight as anything, so the draw was definitely real. The bit about not being able to show the prediction before the results was obviously bullshit – not least because there’s nothing wrong with guessing some numbers, and they can’t worry about disproportionate ticket sales as machines stop selling lottery tickets at half seven in the evening.
The way I think it was done is through clever motion tracking camera trickery – I think the numbers were digitally imposed on the balls. Real time live digital tracking has been around for a few years now – like how the ITV News studio, which is mostly digital greenscreen background moves around with the camera and acts like a “real” backdrop would. This explains why the numbers on the balls looked so real.
Think about it – what is used in TV and film production to track camera movements? Ping-pong balls of course – its why they wear green skin-tight suits covered in ping-pong balls – and ping-pong balls are what the numbers Derren predicted were printed on. How easily tracked.
Rather horrifyingly, from the second the show started I knew it was being filmed at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith – I recognised the pallets just outside (!), and when Derren walked in and it showed the empty audience seating I recognised it from when I went to see Charlie Brooker’s You Have Been Watching being recorded a couple of months ago. A quick look on the Riverside Studios website confirms this. Now why would a TV production rent an entire empty studio?
Renting a studio is phenomenally expensive and thanks to advances in technology such as small cameras and digital production it is much cheaper to do things on location and stuff -massive old-style TV cameras aren’t needed. This is the reason BBC TV Centre is being sold off – studio production simply isn’t needed and isn’t economical (The One Show, for instance, isn’t a “proper” TV studio with lighting rigs and the like – it’s just some converted offices in the BBC Broadcast Centre next door to TVC). So why go to the expense of renting a big TV studio? Especially the biggest one in the Riverside complex… why would the hour long live show afterwards that has a studio audience be relegated to another studio in the Riverside complex?… Why not put them in the biggest studio?
Could it be that Studio 1 at Riverside Studios is the only one equipped to deal with digital motion tracking stuff?
Sure, the camera was shaky and stuff – some might say suspiciously so – but modern digital production techniques can get around this (it wouldn’t surprise me if the shake itself was artificial – steady-cams do exist after all).
The only thing that goes against this “theory” is that it doesn’t fit in with the theme of misdirection that Brown mentioned in the trails for it and stuff.
What do you think? Could I be right? Let me know in the comments.
Update: Peter Price, a man who unlike me actually knows what he is talking about, says that Riverside isn’t equipped for the sort of Free-D technology I speculate about. Though if it did, it would apparently easily put numbers on balls. I’m also well aware that CGI trickery isn’t really in the spirit of what Derren Brown does. But now I’ve speculated this, I may as well stick with it to save face for the time being. So I still think that I’m definitely right.
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