OK. There are a million ways he could have done this. None more ridiculous than the next. Illusionists have used the most elaborate setups imaginable (or indeed so simple you would never dare to guess) in order to achieve illusions. In this blog are ways I think Derren Brown may have predicted the lottery numbers last night. It is not how I think he did it, just how he may have. In the buildup he used heavily edited VT's played in a variety of ways that I think indicate that editing and indeed the inherent artifice of most television has a big part to play in the Illusion.
1) Move-matching and spherical image layers on balls.
Thinking about it.. it would make sense if the whole thing was prerecorded - except for the actual BBC footage. That could be superimposed onto the TV screen pretty easily with use of chroma-key. Then when we say the numbers somebody just entered the numbers into the editing software to display the numbers on the balls whose movement on screen has been recorded and determined previously (very convincingly).
If I filmed you a month ago moving some balls I could map the movement of it, rotation/movement etc, then apply that to a layer which i've just entered a number/word/image into. I would be surprised if this is how he did given the anticlimax of it all. But it is how he could have done it. I wouldn't be surprised if on the reveal on Friday he was actually in the BBC studio himself.
2) Left part of screen cutaway
Again, using move matching a stationary layer is held over the left third of the screen, then when the numbers are read out and he's writing them down in order his lovely assistants are putting the balls in place (behind a digital false wall).
Anyway. That's what I think.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Tuesday, 4 August 2009
Creation.
Come sit my mortal friends, human friends, dirty friends and I will tell ye a tale of the cesspit of origin from whence both you and I were originated. Let ye not be mistaken human , into thinking that you are in any way a clean being. Were you to shower, bathe and scrub for an entire lifetime, your pitiful waste of time could never remove the legacy that enshrouds your very being. Your very organic being. Your very dirty being. For a clean being is not a living being. Without sweat to cool, fecal matter to jettison or shrubs to eat then the chemically balanced waste of space that is your body would cease to function. Not that the universe would care.
So it is we must start at the commencement of life itself. Take from your mind the ipod, the website, the car, the human. Forget you are listening to a radio show, via radio, or computer. Such items of artifice are far removed from the actual way of things. Put yourself- if you will- by a marsh. This marsh possesses no plantlife, no insects, for such things are far ahead of our present predicament. Within the lifeless murky waters a cloud of chemical imbalance exists. In a moment of chance transit it meets a region of another chemical imbalance. Together they appear to have created a third region. A new region of chemical existence. Fast forward us now several millions years hence. the transaction we spoke of before has now repeated itself several million times, and now an orb exists. Withing this orb there exists every chemical that existed, however now in a dance entirely alien to the tundra of planetary lifelessness, they work in unison. They are sentient. They are alive.
As before it learned to use those thing nearby to enhance its existence, we now see that it learns a lesson that will still hold sway among boring animals 10 million years hence - safety in numbers.
A pair of cells became a trio of cells. A trio became ten and so on until the sight we now behold is a haunting spectre, navigating the murky depths, in hunt of other beings who underwent similar metamorphoses in a similar environ, but yet evolved entirely differently. Moving through a motion not entirely dissimilar to sexual writhing, the beast lurches towards its goal in an appalling manner. You would vomit if you could see it. Chasing one prey our beast has now found its ugly head piercing the membrane that capped off its previous world. Flying now our hideous abomination writhes in slow motion, hoping to again catch an element of its known world. Its dirty world.
Never before had this beast experienced such trauma as when it bodily crashed to the earth it had never known before. Indeed, such was the incomprehensible scale of the revelation our 'fish' was too stupid to realise, that as its skull impacted on a mighty pebble and its brains were smote across its immense 10mm diameter, our fishes last thoughts were not of the gravitas of the situation - but more on how next time it should hunt that prey differently. This process was again repeated countless times. Until one of our fish's descendants finally survived the unsurvivable trauma, and gasped at the air of this new realm it distantly had a faint cognition of. Until to navigate, their fins became nubs of vile, slimy semi-usefulness. Until the earth was over run by beings who created for themselves their own environments in which to thrive, exerting their own biological hegemony upon their own prostrate world. Anthills, beehives, houses, sprang up the world over.
Which brings us to today. We must breath a chemical to survive. To survive you must eat the fruit of the earth and in return we give back the earth the mushy unwanted pulp of our biological snobbery. We must escape the real through films, video games and our own ongoing inconsequential drama. Such as this.
So it is we must start at the commencement of life itself. Take from your mind the ipod, the website, the car, the human. Forget you are listening to a radio show, via radio, or computer. Such items of artifice are far removed from the actual way of things. Put yourself- if you will- by a marsh. This marsh possesses no plantlife, no insects, for such things are far ahead of our present predicament. Within the lifeless murky waters a cloud of chemical imbalance exists. In a moment of chance transit it meets a region of another chemical imbalance. Together they appear to have created a third region. A new region of chemical existence. Fast forward us now several millions years hence. the transaction we spoke of before has now repeated itself several million times, and now an orb exists. Withing this orb there exists every chemical that existed, however now in a dance entirely alien to the tundra of planetary lifelessness, they work in unison. They are sentient. They are alive.
As before it learned to use those thing nearby to enhance its existence, we now see that it learns a lesson that will still hold sway among boring animals 10 million years hence - safety in numbers.
A pair of cells became a trio of cells. A trio became ten and so on until the sight we now behold is a haunting spectre, navigating the murky depths, in hunt of other beings who underwent similar metamorphoses in a similar environ, but yet evolved entirely differently. Moving through a motion not entirely dissimilar to sexual writhing, the beast lurches towards its goal in an appalling manner. You would vomit if you could see it. Chasing one prey our beast has now found its ugly head piercing the membrane that capped off its previous world. Flying now our hideous abomination writhes in slow motion, hoping to again catch an element of its known world. Its dirty world.
Never before had this beast experienced such trauma as when it bodily crashed to the earth it had never known before. Indeed, such was the incomprehensible scale of the revelation our 'fish' was too stupid to realise, that as its skull impacted on a mighty pebble and its brains were smote across its immense 10mm diameter, our fishes last thoughts were not of the gravitas of the situation - but more on how next time it should hunt that prey differently. This process was again repeated countless times. Until one of our fish's descendants finally survived the unsurvivable trauma, and gasped at the air of this new realm it distantly had a faint cognition of. Until to navigate, their fins became nubs of vile, slimy semi-usefulness. Until the earth was over run by beings who created for themselves their own environments in which to thrive, exerting their own biological hegemony upon their own prostrate world. Anthills, beehives, houses, sprang up the world over.
Which brings us to today. We must breath a chemical to survive. To survive you must eat the fruit of the earth and in return we give back the earth the mushy unwanted pulp of our biological snobbery. We must escape the real through films, video games and our own ongoing inconsequential drama. Such as this.
Friday, 24 July 2009
INT. BRAIN - DAY
I hate blogs. Seriously.
Everytime I see one or have considered doing one I feel a slight nausea to think that I (or anybody for that matter) should deem their own words and opinions to be of sufficient gravitas to be broadcast to the big wide world. Often intimate words, often indiscriminately pointless, self agrandising, self-depracting, all destined to be meh'ed at by the masses.
Another reason I dislike blogs is because of the fact that they only exist in the ether. You can not touch them, when you die nobody will find these in your attic and if humanity were to cease right now no subsequent species would discover these words. They would find the server and use it as a coffee table. No doubt - more on this later.
So here I am. Entering fingers first into the treacherous cringe worthy world of 'blogging'.
My words dont matter. Your words dont matter. The moment we think they do is the moment we lose ourselves in the artifice of the world we have created. We are beasts who cannot survive without the organic, without chemicals.
No doubt this blog is going to be shit. I can in no way lay claims to having been a pioneer of blogging (gladly). In fact I view such claims akin claiming to be a pioneer of littering. I cant 'code', im not entirely 'web-savvy', 'web 2.0', or '*insert slightly cringemaking slogan*'. All I know is that I have seen a lot, done a lot and think a lot.
Hopefully this method of catharsis will work and we will all reach some ridiculous kind of electronic nirvana. Probably not though.
the end
Everytime I see one or have considered doing one I feel a slight nausea to think that I (or anybody for that matter) should deem their own words and opinions to be of sufficient gravitas to be broadcast to the big wide world. Often intimate words, often indiscriminately pointless, self agrandising, self-depracting, all destined to be meh'ed at by the masses.
Another reason I dislike blogs is because of the fact that they only exist in the ether. You can not touch them, when you die nobody will find these in your attic and if humanity were to cease right now no subsequent species would discover these words. They would find the server and use it as a coffee table. No doubt - more on this later.
So here I am. Entering fingers first into the treacherous cringe worthy world of 'blogging'.
My words dont matter. Your words dont matter. The moment we think they do is the moment we lose ourselves in the artifice of the world we have created. We are beasts who cannot survive without the organic, without chemicals.
No doubt this blog is going to be shit. I can in no way lay claims to having been a pioneer of blogging (gladly). In fact I view such claims akin claiming to be a pioneer of littering. I cant 'code', im not entirely 'web-savvy', 'web 2.0', or '*insert slightly cringemaking slogan*'. All I know is that I have seen a lot, done a lot and think a lot.
Hopefully this method of catharsis will work and we will all reach some ridiculous kind of electronic nirvana. Probably not though.
the end
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