Color-Changing Card Trick
posted at 9:39 AM
One of the highlights of The Amazing Meeting each year is an appearance by Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British psychology professor who does some very interesting and very entertaining research, much of it about perception. Here's a sample of his work, The Color-Changing Card Trick. See if you can catch him making the switch...
21 Comments:
Yes, but would it work if there wasn't a gorilla present?
ARRRGH! I am an idiot! I didn't see any change and I was looking for one!!! No wonder I never notice my wife's new hair styles!
hahaha that was great!
i honestly didnt noticed the changes of colours, but i think that my mind thought of them as changes in the illumination of the scene and therefore thought of them as "normal"
awesome effect!!!!
blarghh! didn't notice any changes till they showed me how it was done.
... :(
*rofl* I did not notice one of the changes before shown. Even worse: I had to watch the clip twice before realising the moment the card desk was changed :)
Still not sure I get it. You are right, I missed all the other changes that happened. However I did not see any switch of the cards. Was there some sort of color filter in the camera lens that made the colors of the cards change or something?
Try watching the video again... the whole thing, mind you. The colour changes are very clearly shown in the second half of the video.
Steve -
The deck of cards gets switched while Sarah is showing everyone the 3 of diamonds. One of the stagehands takes the blue deck from Richard and hands him the red deck, while with his other hand Richard removes the black tablecloth.
You probably missed it because even with the wide shot, your eye is "following the trick" rather than observing the "sleight."
BTW - of course, once Richard has the red deck in hand, he doesn't ever show the red backs of the cards until the very end of the trick. Notice how he sticks Sarah's blue card into the deck with the card faces toward the camera...and keeps it that way until the end of the trick when he flips the cards over to reveal the red backs.
All magicians do the trick this way...they just handle the deck change with a less-obvious move to a pocket on their person.
At 44 seconds left in the video you can see him hand off the cards to get the other colour deck right before he changes the colour of the table. No camera filters involved.
I missed the first change, but I caught the other ones. I think the longer I got used to something being one color, the more clear it was when it changed. We only saw Richard for about 10 seconds with the yellow shirt on. We had longer to adjust to Sarah's black shirt, and so the change in shirt color seemed stranger. The table color change had me laughing, because I KNEW the table was originally black, considering all the close ups on it. The background obviously changed the illumination, though once you notice that shirt colors and such are changing, you pay attention to the color of everything.
wow i got owned
The switching of the deck was easy to figure out, (the camera wasn't even on Richard when it occured), but I didn't notice any of the other colour changes. I "kept my eye on the card".
Classic misdirection.
Good one.
All of the changes occurred off camera. All we as observers had the opportuity to detect was the results of the off camera switches.
Missed them all, but then again, I have almost no color memory. I had known my wife for 13 yrs, and when asked her eye color for a safety deposit box, had to guess. We just came back from dinner, and I couldn't tell you what she was wearing, color or otherwise.
So tell me now about the reliability of eye witnesses!
And Tell me how many inocent people are sitting in jail because of eye witnesses?
Or how many guilty people are not in jail because of eye witnesses?
I certainly would be a baaaad eye witness! All I saw was the Gorilla! And then only because he looked like someone I once knew!
"e. said...
*rofl* I did not notice one of the changes before shown. Even worse: I had to watch the clip twice before realising the moment the card desk was changed :)"
I think you're missing the point. The idea of the excercise was not to give away the card trick but to show you how easily the unconsious mind is fooled.
I'd say there were at least two points to the clip. One is that misdirection can happen on planes other than visual; the sentence immediately above the vid is the first, planting your concentration on the cards, even for those used to looking for visual misdirection. Richard, I'm sure, could have used any number of spots to swap the card deck out in full view.
Did you notice that at the point that they were both wearing black the camera didn't show any part of them together? After she chose the card the camera deliberately panned left down the table before rising on Richard.
I noticed that his shirt changed. Nothing else.
I like how he made the numbers 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 appear in midair like that. I bet they did it with wires.
I was aware that something had changed with the curtain backdrop, although I couldn't for the life of me work out what. I knew it wasn't pink to start with, but by the time I noticed it WAS pink I'd forgotten what it had started with.
The other stuff. Nope. Missed it.
Like most people I didnt notice the changes and so was misdirected. But I'm afraid this kind of psychological trick leaves me cold. Magic is no more about psychological/visual misdirection than it is about gimmicks of sleight of hand, these are all just tools. Wiseman's book Magic in Theory is interesting but never gets past this simple misconception. Magic is most interesting as a cultural rather than a psychological phenomenon.
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