What about a documentary?

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Alberto Neri
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What about a documentary?

Post by Alberto Neri » September 6th, 2022, 1:06 am

I searched for good video that talks exclusively of Conway's Game of Life. But doesn't exist; and yes, I saw the BBC's, Veritasium et al.

Due lack of really good documentary I will be doing one about 45:00 to 60:00 minutes, maybe more. Or maybe shortest chapters of 20:00—30:00 minutes.

I have enough experience in multimedia technology, I worked in television (Studied Television and audiovisual media) also, my crew and I made some short movies, then it's not a issue… well, stop talk of me.

The point is: I will make THE DOCUMENTARY (yes, or yes); I've spend almost a year check one by one of the huge collection of patterns in (https://conwaylife.com/patterns/all.zip) for select the most illustrative & interesting patterns.

I'm not english native speaker, but the documentary will be in english among other languages (spoken and subtitled).

This work isn't commercial, no money involved. All collaboration will be "Pro bono".

What I need for you are:
• Volunteers for translation for others languages.
• Volunteers for dubbin voice for all languages. Ideally native speakers.
• Technical advisors of Golly and other tech.
• Experts of Conway's Game of Life (for not make factual mistakes).
• Suggesters of topics for the documentary.

I will credit in the documentary itself (scrolling credits) for all and each one of the collaborated persons. If will be a website of the documentary, also in it.

We will use original music made specially for the documentary.

My goal is make the Cosmos documentary equivalent of Conway's Game of Life. This is a love letter for the memory of John Horton Conway.


Thanks in advance. Will be in contact soon.

— Alberto Neri.

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dvgrn
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Re: What about a documentary?

Post by dvgrn » November 9th, 2022, 6:23 am

A documentary about all of Conway's Life would be a very big project, depending on how much detail you go into. It could be hard to decide what subset of the 52-year story to focus on.

On the other hand, I think that right now would be a great time to start putting together a video on one particular Life topic. It would probably take an hour to lead up to and describe the Reverse Caber Tosser project.

RCT demonstrates how, for any pattern you can make in the Life universe by crashing together any number of gliders, you can make that exact same pattern by crashing together exactly 16 gliders -- sixteen, no more and no less. EDIT: Okay, as of mid-November 2022 it's fifteen instead of sixteen.

Explaining how RCT works at documentary-level detail will mean doing a recap of a fair fraction of the history of Conway's Life research. New discoveries have been building on old ones for many decades now to make this 16-glider universality result possible.

With RCT as a focus, there's a good single goal to work toward, a "punch line" so to speak. It seems like a good way to limit the topic while creating a documentary that's definitely unlike anything that currently exists.

Here are two blog posts that collectively contain the biggest compilation of detail so far about the RCT15 project:

Building Arbitrary Life Patterns in 15 Gliders
In Conway's Life, Fifteen Gliders Can Build Anything* !

AlbertArmStain
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Re: What about a documentary?

Post by AlbertArmStain » November 9th, 2022, 8:13 am

The book will definitely help you here,
Here’s the book link:
https://conwaylife.com/book/

Alberto Neri
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Joined: July 26th, 2019, 4:16 pm

Re: What about a documentary?

Post by Alberto Neri » November 30th, 2022, 12:27 pm

Thanks.

You are right, it's a huge project I suppose that we need break apart in various chapters the documentary.

Traditionally one season of a TV show are divided in 13 episodes (52 weeks in a year divided between 4) and then is released one per week… but the internet kills the traditional TV.

Soon I will share my own list of topics that I think are interesting for the documentary.

P.S. I have been reading the book. It's so good.

Alberto Neri
Posts: 5
Joined: July 26th, 2019, 4:16 pm

Re: What about a documentary?

Post by Alberto Neri » November 30th, 2022, 12:35 pm

AlbertArmStain wrote:
November 9th, 2022, 8:13 am
The book will definitely help you here,
Here’s the book link:
https://conwaylife.com/book/
Thanks, the book is great.

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HerscheltheHerschel
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Re: What about a documentary?

Post by HerscheltheHerschel » October 15th, 2023, 7:45 am

Will it be available on YouTube?
superstrings, fuses, waves, wicks, and agars are cool
30P5H2V0 IS A BAD, UNMEMORIZABLE NAME
moved to new account hth

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