Polarizing

Buy a Polaroid camera off of ebay for like $15.

Then search for "expired Polaroid film" and buy some of that. Once you have it in your possession, take it out of it's sealed wrapper and let it sit around for a few months in hot and humid environments.

Then put this film in your camera. The film will be usable, but the pictures will come out yellow and faded like they're decades old.

You can probably mimic this degradation process with new Polaroid film (which they still make) by actively fucking with the film. It's supposed to be kept sealed in a cool, dry place. So keep it unsealed in hot and wet places. Toss it in the oven for a few minutes on low heat, keep it in the bathroom when you're taking a shower. I've never really tried this, but it seems like it would work.

Why do this? There is great power in a printed prediction, there is also great power in a photo prediction. I think we all understand this. But I've found a Polaroid is an even stronger medium for exhibiting a prediction. Why? I'm guessing because we live in a time where things can be printed and photos can be modified with relative ease, but a Polaroid feels like something that can't be tampered with. If you're holding a seemingly old Polaroid picture you feel like it was a captured moment from many years ago. So if that moment ends up predicting something that happens in the present, there is a very strong and slightly spooky quality to it. Much more so than if you just showed them a prediction printed on paper, or a photo on your phone.

Above is one of the first pictures I ever took using aged film. When you hold it, it looks like it's 30 years old, but it came out of the camera looking like that. I use it as the finale of spectator cuts the aces routine, but simply substitute in these 4 cards for the aces. This is similar to the effect I wrote up during Presentation Week Part 4. 

There are a number of presentational possibilities as far as where you got this Polaroid and what it means to have access to such a thing, but for now I'll leave that to you to create.

One of my favorite uses of this is for the Osterlind/Thompson/Gardner effect where you predict the outcome of a tic-tac-toe game with your spectator. I saw Osterlind's version, Predict-Tac-Toe, on one of his DVDs where he used a picture as the reveal at the end. But to do it with a Polaroid of two little girls, in timeless dresses, playing tic-tac-toe in chalk on the street -- and to have this faded, old photograph, with one girl giving the camera an odd, intense stare, it just becomes a much stronger ending than a standard photograph.

I highly recommend considering this technique for use in any prediction type effects you do. The ideas you can have for this are really only limited by your imagination. So in your case you'll probably get half an idea.