Derren Brown pulled off a wonderful illusion in “predicting” the numbers for the National Lottery and there are dozens of mainstream theories around concerning his methods.

I’m an amateur magician myself and whenever I’m trying to figure out how a trick is done I always start with the simplest solution so here is my first theory…

The stand has a curved image matching the background running all the way up it. This is a simple image “mask” on paper or card and can be pulled out very quickly by an Assistant from underneath so that the it becomes truly see-through in the blink of an eye showing the true background through it. There are “shell” balls (ie only the back halves) on the stand’s tray to start with. A compressed air system exists that blows air up the centre of the hollow stand and re-routes some of it into one side of the tray. The first four balls blown up the tube are 2, 11, 23 and 39. They all travel up the tube and are then blown to the right by the constant air pressure coming from the Left. (This assumes that the airflow is from left to right as seen from the front. Of course it could just as easily be from right to left, in which case the order would have to reflect this.) These four are followed by the 35 which hits in the middle of the 39 and 23 balls displacing the 39 to the left. The last ball, the 28, hits the middle of the 35 and 23 displacing both the 39 and 35 to the extreme left. The balls would simply have to be loaded into the system by an assistant in 123654 order then the assistant would have to whip out the mask from the stand.

I know this isn’t a perfect theory but I think the basis is sound. A great trick however it was done although I’d hate to think it was a split-screen Camera wipe which brings me to Theory No.2…

I’ve worked in video production and so I’m well aware how easy it would have been for him to have used Camera Trickery to pull off something like this. To do it one would have needed to merge pre-record video of the left side of the empty stage with the live right-hand-side showing Derren doing his patter.

The live video picture would have to have been filmed with a static camera in order to make a seamless wipe from showing the whole studio to showing the merge and it would then have been an easy matter to feed the resulting split-screen video picture into a video digital signal processor to create the illusion of camera shake.

Doing it this way, Derren would have needed the help of an assistant to simply place the correct balls in the stand when the results were being announced. All this helper would have needed is a silent gliding trolley with all the balls easily accessible. Derren does allow about six seconds for such a person and trolley to make an escape to stage left before entering the left-hand side of the video window, so this seems plausible.

There are many video “solutions” at YouTube and a few of them illustrate exactly how this camera trickery could have been used. The embedded videos shown above and below are two of the most amusing ones.

Whatever the secret there is no denying that Derren Brown is a very entertaining and accomplished magician. He has a naturalistic outlook and would be the first to admit that all magic is trickery. Check out his very interesting interview with Richard Dawkins on the subject of Cold Reading (posted on YouTube) to verify this.