no fun
A while ago I wrote this out to try and make sense of a magic trick without reading how it was done (I couldn't find the instructions without paying money!), using only the video evidence....I was bored.
First Go watch Derren Brown's Judging People By Photos amazing trick!
Here is another example of the same thing. That guy isn't so special.
The first assumption is that the magician used obviously happy or attractive photos for the "alive" and bad looking photos for the "dead". This doesn't need to be the case.
Here is the proof that it's a trick. You can track the placement of two photos the participant puts in the "negative / dead" pile that end up in the "alive" pile.
The camera in the second example with Toruga didn't show any examples I could track.
See how he doesn't give the participant a chance to check by very carefully showing only the back of the cards during the reveal?
This trick relies on the fact that people won't remember what they've sorted
- the great number of photos
- people's short term memory can't remember individual photos
- revealing the sorting by only showing the word-side of the photos so the participant doesn't even have a chance to see if the piles that the magician ended with is the one she sorted
- one on one attention, also lessening the chance that someone will notice the mismatch
- For the web and TV, with a giant audience the video camera does not let us see exactly what is sorted at all times
- a physical, quick method of sorting the dead and alive cards, possibly a stripper deck
It is a variation on a trick created by Paul Curry called "Out of This World", which Derren Brown even says at the end of the video, "Thanks, that was out of this world," as a shout out to magicians.
First Go watch Derren Brown's Judging People By Photos amazing trick!
Here is another example of the same thing. That guy isn't so special.
Click to viewThe first assumption is that the magician used obviously happy or attractive photos for the "alive" and bad looking photos for the "dead". This doesn't need to be the case.
Here is the proof that it's a trick. You can track the placement of two photos the participant puts in the "negative / dead" pile that end up in the "alive" pile.
The camera in the second example with Toruga didn't show any examples I could track.
See how he doesn't give the participant a chance to check by very carefully showing only the back of the cards during the reveal?
This trick relies on the fact that people won't remember what they've sorted
- the great number of photos
- people's short term memory can't remember individual photos
- revealing the sorting by only showing the word-side of the photos so the participant doesn't even have a chance to see if the piles that the magician ended with is the one she sorted
- one on one attention, also lessening the chance that someone will notice the mismatch
- For the web and TV, with a giant audience the video camera does not let us see exactly what is sorted at all times
- a physical, quick method of sorting the dead and alive cards, possibly a stripper deck
It is a variation on a trick created by Paul Curry called "Out of This World", which Derren Brown even says at the end of the video, "Thanks, that was out of this world," as a shout out to magicians.