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Print & screen effect

Life Bloom

Life Bloom is a halftone and retro screen effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Conway’s Life played out on the frame — the picture decides where the board starts alive, and keeps striking new cells as it plays.

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try Life Bloom free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle art with scattered mint-green square cells in Life patterns across it — Life Bloom, default settings

What Life Bloom does

Runs Conway's Life on a grid laid over the picture. The board starts densest where the art is bright, and within seconds most of it dies off into gliders, blinkers and still blocks, drawn as mint tiles with darker trails. Revive keeps the picture striking fresh cells so it never goes quiet, Trail sets how long a dead cell lingers, and Scale sets the tile size.

Using Life Bloom

Where it works: Slow intros and ambient loops where something small keeps happening, and generative texture over a logo that stays readable because the board only covers part of the frame. Of the three automata it's the sparsest.
With the music: The rule steps twelve generations a second at centre Speed, off the clock rather than the beat. Send B1 kick to Revive and each kick scatters new live cells across the bright parts of the picture.
Starting point: Scale at centre, Density at centre, Revive at three-quarters, Trail at three-quarters, Blend at three-quarters, then lower Speed until gliders visibly travel.

Controls

Scale: Size of one cell, and with it how many the board holds.
Density: How much of the board starts alive. Life is fussy about this — too sparse and it barely catches, too crowded and most of it dies in the first few generations.
Revive: How often the picture strikes a fresh live cell. At zero the board plays out and settles into still lifes and blinkers; above it something is always starting.
Trail: How long a cell stays visible after it dies, which is what turns a flickering board into something with movement in it.
Tint: Colour of a living cell. The trail sits a little further round the wheel.
Glow: Extra light thrown by living cells.
Blend: Weight of the board over the picture underneath.
Speed: Rate of the effect motion. Centre is the authored speed, hard left a tenth of it.

Pairs well with Life Bloom