MPJ

After the longest minute of my life I finally regained my senses and rationality back and more importantly ability to speak. Well sort of. At the moment all I came up with was few incoherent words.

"I.. I'm.. Also glad..  To meet you. Phil?"

The initial fear and tremble started to fade out so I went to my desk and sit on the chair. The orb followed and kept the same distance.

"I am sure you have a lot of questions for me?"

"Well.. For starters you could tell me who you really are? And.. What is the meaning of all this? I mean, what happened five years ago.." - I was trying to remember all the questions I had after I woke up that morning and found the orb on the clock table next to my bad. But now all the new ones started to form in my mind and I was pretty confused. The orb definitely saw it on my face.

"It was five years for you but where I came from time is something entirely different. It was just a moment ago for me." - Phil gave me couple of seconds to sink in and then continued. "In my plain of existence, I am a student, just like you." - The orb made a slight position change and proceed. "But let's back to your conversation with your father couple of minutes ago, it would be best for you to understand if we start from there."

"Yes.. You said he was right. You mean two dimensional bubble around the universe is real. We are made of holographic particles reflected by our true selves from the balloon surface?

"Yes and no." - Phil continued to flicker in all colors while speaking. "The bubble exists all right, but it is created in four dimensional reality. The only thing is that dimensions are not all proportional. One of them is larger than the others and one is really tiny, speaking in physics terms. They are designed in that way in order to cast three dimensional objects inside the bubble. Everything here in this universe is actually a three dimensional shadow from the bubble surrounding it. Or to be precise, every four dimensional object in the bubble is actively casting it's own representation inhere."

"But how this casting really work...." - There was so many information for a high school student in just couple of sentences and only now I realized I missed the premise. "Wait. You said designed? Created? By whom?"

"By me, of course."

At this point it occurred to me two more explanations of all this. It's either I finally went 100% crazy and this was my first hallucination or somebody is pranking me with some cool magic trick. I was about to announce to my new friend here that first option is more likely but he promptly continued.

"I am not God or anything like it, if you are thinking about it right now. Look at it this way, you here developed complex computers with ability to render equally complex simulation. This is very similar. Where I came from, we use, sort of analogue computational devices capable to create sub-dimensional environments. We utilized those machines for education. This is one of them and there are many more. Just like I hinted five years ago, this is similar to those zero-player games you are probably familiar with. I created only initial states of the three-dimensional universe and the rest came out from it by evolutionary steps. The best about it is that I can monitor what happens in snapshots. The time in the bubble is set to be very fast comparing to my end."

The voice sounded excited while explaining. I took it as a sign of his character as a student who is still learning exciting things. I know I was no different either.

"But to answer your second question, casting is possible because the energy needed to cast objects from four-dimensional bubble into three-dimensional interior is coming from.."

"Fifth dimension!" - I interrupted way more enthusiastically then him before. "The origin must be one dimension higher! You are fifth dimensional being!"

"Exactly right. Two of two."

"Amazing! I saw once Carl Sagan's interpolation of the tesseract from 4D into its shadow in 3D. This is just like it, except we are talking now about a live universe who gave birth to life!"

"Not exactly."

"What do you mean?"

"It's not live. Actually, not a single universe in any simulations I've heard about ever succeeded with emerging life by their own."

"But.. All the life here on Earth.. How?"

"I created the model to assign sentient driver to every object who's born naturally or artificially within the system."

"Sentient driver?"

"Something similar to the artificial intelligence from your world. Much complicated though."

"So, my conscience as everybody's in the universe is just a software part of your bubble computer.. What about free will?"

"There is no such thing. Biologically or otherwise. Free will is just an illusion coming from vast number of variables. But don't take it inferiorly. In my world, sentient drivers are equal in complexity to the real life, if real life is what I am supposed to be.. Actually nobody believes that even we could not be sentient drivers either. We could also be shadows of upper-dimensions as well. Life as it seems is as much as mystery as it is here."

I found my way back to the chair. I certainly didn't expect anything like it. This really is the game, only we are all non-player characters in Phil's zero-player game that even he cannot deviate from the course of artificial evolution. Or can he? After all he is talking with me from fifth dimension in real time. The orb must be anomaly of some kind. A back door to his own simulation.

"I know what are you thinking right now. And you can relax. I cannot read sentient minds, you are on your own. That's for sure. While I can project objects like this orb inside the simulation I cannot affect evolutionary steps or to interfere with driver's actions. Not that it's forbidden or anything. It's just impossible by it's nature. I can project a dream or two here and there but this is not influencing the system with much significance. If at all..." - Phil made a significant pause here. I could tell by the light and the glowing vanished for a long second. I couldn't describe exactly how but when it came back the feeling it radiated changed. "The thing is that this is my first educational project and I shouldn't interfere in any ways. But overtime I grown attached to this entire space it was created. It is really beautiful in more ways than you can imagine..."

"Why then? Why are you do it? Why talking to me?" - The only question left at that point remained floating in the air and I was little afraid to raise it.

"Why me?"

Phil rotated and the glow transformed into recognizable patterns. Images started to form on the orb's surface and change from one to another in a fast snapshot fashion. Some I recognized from the history lessons, others were unfamiliar and futuristic. Some looked alien but beautiful nevertheless. Then it returned to the regular form.

"Because..."

The orb floated a foot closer.

"...I need your help."

I guess my sentient mind wasn't programmed to reply to this in any ways so I just cluelessly stared at Phil and his three blue shivering nodes and his smooth surface glowing in all colors I was familiar with and some I imagined to see for the first time.

"I want you to help me to save the universe." 

Game of Life is an old news, yes, but last Friday I stumbled to something special that forced me to relive the film once more. It was an extraordinary comic book creator called "Comic Life", made by plasq development company which gave me genuine pleasure last entire weekend. I was looking for a comic book related application before and even tried couple of them but they were all way below Comic Life and all the features it offers. I was immediately hooked by its nativity and simplicity and instantly thought about our short film. After very little hesitation I decided to give it a try and the result is sort of "Game of Life" made by "Comic (of) Life".

After all, I had everything, the script, the video file and the free time last weekend and to create a comic book out of it was pretty straightforward. What I did was to open Game of Life in VLC player and to take couple of screenshots in order to import them into "Comic Life" and the rest is in this post. Well, soon after, couple of screenshots turned into dozens and dozens into exactly 195 images but it all was worth the effort. Actually it wasn't without little post processing but I enjoyed it all the way. Last night we went to laser print the first copy and here it is below in Viktor's hands and in following preview (it needs some time to load).


If you have seen the film and liked it, and if you are a comic book fan like me, I am sure you will find it entertaining and visually, well I wouldn't say perfect, or even good, but for a first-timer effort pretty well. You can click on the preview to open a Game of Life PDF file in another tab and see it full screen or if you a perfectionist, below is a full resolution file with images in 300dpi you can download.

I am surely still thrilled of how good it went out and especially for entire entertainment I had during making it, so for a moment I thought it was even better then the video itself. But today, like they say, the breakfast is always smarter then last day dinner, I am not so sure. They are two different media and not comparable per se. While the motion pictures contain that magical aspect of living the story and especially in this case hearing the glitch and effects, it lacks the narrative which is the main feature of one graphic novel. Nevertheless, following is the embedded film as well so if you have some comments, feedback or anything to say I would love to hear it. Or better to read it.


The film script and now graphic novel(la), tells a story about a young boy who's following a glitch in the system, presented in real life as a firefly, through numerous portals to the place where he meets a man with the final orb, the artifact that seems to be a way in for full understanding of the life itself, its origin and the rules it is built on.

Game of Life is only a first episode in the series and I called it "Flares and Fireflies" and perhaps just an introduction in the larger plot, which we hope we will continue making in the future. Finally, if you missed the story of how we made it, the script and all the funny moments, they are all in post Game of Life and Cyclops of Peloponnese and of course what inspired me to make the story is in simple question: Is Life a Zero-Player Game? and John Conway's original zero player game.


Original post: March, 2017, Update: July 2018

Game of Life 300dpi:
http://www.dmvprocessing.com/blog/GolComic/Game of Life - 300dpi.pdf

Refs:
https://plasq.com/apps/comiclife/macwin/

People are asking me these days what is "Game of Life" we are dealing with this whole summer? The only honest answer I can give is that I don't really know. I guess I lost myself into entire story of our pioneer film making project. It started like any other father-son benign tech play - it was sometime back in the middle of April when I was categorizing our pile of ordinary family video files and our 'cooking series' so in a moment of 'light bulb floating above my head' I asked myself why we don't move one step further and create a little longer short film of some sort. So I asked Viktor and he seemed thrilled about it, especially when I told him that he would play the major role and from there our "Game of Life" project became reality and started growing and morphing into real short movie and after little while began being more and more enjoyable and serious.

In short, after four months of all of our 'Hollywood' efforts, Viktor and I proudly present a science fiction short film based on "Game of Life", a cellular automaton game invented by John Horton Conway in 1970. Actually, this is the first episode in potential series we called "Flares and Fireflies". We hope you will enjoy watching at least as much we enjoyed making it and - this is important - please keep in mind that we are not really educated film-makers or talented actors and that this is pretty much maximum what we could do with all of our knowledge and modest technology we used, to say the least. If you like it, after the movie, later in the post, is the story of how and where we made it, entire script, some blooper stories and behind the scenes photos.


First of all, I hope you like our film and for further understanding what I would say about the core of its script is that it tells a story about a young boy who's following a glitch in the system, presented in real life as a firefly, through numerous portals to the place where he meets a man with the final orb, the artifact that seems to be a way in for full understanding of the life itself, its origin and the rules it is built on. Just like in Conway's simple two-dimensional game, the life itself could be the same - just a set of rules in some artificial zero-player game that on quantum or molecular level provides results of interactions of main ingredients.

That was about "Sci" part of the "Sci-Fi" genre. Fiction that follows the story is in the fact that the life might be fully artificial in origin. In other words, the film explores the rules of evolution that are not intended to be seen or understood by everyone. Even those chosen to dive into game by random case or by complex rules outcome are not able to understand the principles at once. If you are asking now how the game of life really looks from the inside and behind white-green wireframes, well, you will have to wait for another episode. But, is there going to be another episode? The honest answer is that I don't know. I really don't. So far we only have ideas and from there to the final file is a long way. We'll see.


This long way with the first episode started with the script. Believe it or not, first draft and the final scenario was not too different. It slightly changed but only because of technological restrictions and improvisations. Ever wonder how script looks like for short films like this one? Here it is in full:


In the end, "Game of Life" is composed out from 50 scenes filmed on four major locations. Two of them are Viktor's room and our living room decorated with green screen for the occasion. The adventure starts and ends in main character's room and the only dialog is filmed in front of green background and merged with coastal background we took in Greece. Unfortunately, technologically speaking, this is the weakest chain in the movie and not only because of our lack of efforts. "Chroma key" software within Adobe's "After Effects" didn't cope too well with modest laptop I have used to run it through. It failed and crashed too often during rendering and it got out the last nerves out of me. If you add to all the struggles that consumer dSLR (Nikon D5200) we used to film it is not perfect for audio capture without external microphone, and the fact that we had to record audio separately, I have to say that I am not really satisfied with dialog scene but in the end I'd like to think that this is the best I could do with editing that part of the film.


However, this film would not be possible without a lighthouse as it plays major role in the story and we found it just 20 kilometers from our hotel during our summer's vacation. It was located some 30 kilometers away from famous Greek city of Corinth built on a rock at the end of a small headland with tremendous view to the entire Corinthian gulf. We spent three days on the site and nearby beach and finished all the 'Greek' scenes and enjoyed amazing time on local beaches and restaurants. In above photo, Viktor, with our 'nerf' portal stone preps, is posing in front of 'Faros Melagavi' not far away from the 'Vouliagmenis' lake where we filmed last portal scene and also just next to ancient archaeological site of 'Heraion of Perachora' - a sanctuary occupied by real oracle, just like the one in Delphi, dedicated to the goddess Hera and built in 9th century BC by some Corinthian ancient cult. Here, just next to the old ruins of the temple of Hera I found a stone perfect for the background of the green screen dialog scene. Before we went to Greece, I 'scouted' the entire site with Google Maps and photos people took and posted in the Google's gallery and all I have to say is that it looked perfect for filming just like I hoped for. Very little improvisations were needed for 'running' and 'firefly' scenes. The same was with filming 'portal' scene on the beautiful sandy beach of Vouliagmenis lake, which is actually a lagoon connected to the Corinthian gulf and Ionian sea with a narrow strait.

Finally, the fourth location we used to film intermediate portal scenes belongs to our special place - a village in eastern Serbia where we spent many vacations and weekends in the past. The name of the village is Guševac and I mentioned it before on the blog on numerous occasions. With its intact mountain spirit it was our first choice. The very first scene was actually filmed here in the abandoned barn. I intended to use nearby forests for additional scenes for second portal but due to the complexity I gave up of that idea. It would be visually great but it is not really that connected to the main story.


If you ask me what I liked the most behind and before the scenes of "Game of Life", without a doubt I say it is the entire adventure of making it. It started as a father-son summer play and in the end, this is what it really is - endless fun of filming scenes, creating script, directing the plot, improvising the story and scenes, enjoying all the bloopers and laughter on all 'sets', especially in Greece. I really can't say what was funnier to do. Even the editing was special time with learning all new stuff and knowledge and in a way I am now looking on movies and TV shows with different eyes and capturing all the perfect and imperfect flow of scenes with my new 'director' habit. Small regret and disappointment was the equipment. I know I am not perfect director and cameraman but I am more than positive that with at least little better technology, including software and rendering computer, the final movie would be much better. At least it would mask or hide most of our imperfection and flaws.

One thing is for sure though - if you are thinking of filming your own short movie with modest consumer camera and not so obeying tripod - don't think twice - go for it and however the result is non-ideal in the end, I guarantee you that the feeling will be just perfect.

Revelation of Life (Game of Life sequel):
https://www.mpj.one/2020/10/revelation-of-life-part-one.html

Game of Life graphic novel:
https://www.milanzivic.com/2017/03/gol-graphic-novel.html

Refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_Game_of_Life
http://www.milanzivic.com/2015/12/is-life-zero-player-game.html
http://www.milanzivic.com/2016/08/cyclops-of-peloponnese.html