Timelapse of the Future
Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time is a 2019 short epic documentary film created by American astronomy-themed musician and filmmaker John D. Boswell, made as a follow-up to his other short film Timelapse of the Entire Universe. Running at 29 minutes, it is a flowmotion—a combination of a hyper-lapse, time-lapse, and regular shots—of the universe from 2019 to the end of time, with the lapse rate doubling every five seconds. The film consists of self-made and fair use footage from films, the Internet, and speeches by scientists, using current knowledge and combining different hypotheses.
Boswell spent six months on production, beginning in mid-2018, with several months of research prior. It was initially conceived as an art installation without dialogue, but later changed due to the weight of the subject matter. The film's soundtrack combines original music with stock audio; the former was later released in an album titled The Arrow of Time.
Timelapse of the Future was released on Boswell's YouTube channel melodysheep and screened on several venues; it also won the 2020 Webby Awards. The film became viral, garnering millions of views and received positive reviews for its audiovisual craft, though some of the plot points were noted as mere speculations. The film inspired a song and music video by Noah Cyrus.
Plot
The film opens and closes with a quote by Helen Keller: "Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence. And I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content."The Anthropocene era begins. Following natural events, humans land on Mars, and Earth's magnetic field flips. Comet Hale-Bopp returns in the year 4385, followed by extreme sea-level rise, an asteroid impact, and Antares going supernova. The Sahara becomes tropical in the 15th millennium, constellations begin to wander, Voyager 1 passes Gliese 445 in the 39th millennium, and the Interglacial Period ends. The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts within 100,000 years, followed by the Apollo 11 footprints fading within a million years, Betelgeuse going supernova, and stone monuments eroding. Next, a gamma-ray burst occurs, Phobos becomes a ring system, and Saturn's rings disappear. Antarctica melts within 50 million years, followed by a significant asteroid impact by the year 70 million, and the formation of a supercontinent by the year 150 million. The Sun's luminosity increases 300 million years later, causing plants to die 400 million more years down the line, followed by life as a whole in the year 3 billion as oceans evaporate. The Sun then expands and becomes a red giant — destroying Earth in the process — before dying as a white dwarf in the year 7.65 billion. Other stars then slowly die, making the universe end in a whimper. The last red dwarfs die in the year 100 trillion.
With stars having completely run out of fuel, the Degenerate Era begins. The universe contains pulsars, black holes, and brown dwarfs, barely lit up by white dwarfs. Over time, gravity ejects most cosmic remnants into the freezing interstellar space. Notably, neutron stars may collide and make superluminous supernovae. Extraterrestrial life might live around aging white dwarfs, which someday die and become black dwarfs. At some point, the supermassive black hole at the center of each galaxy will suck up all degenerate matter that fails to escape it, a similar process to the fate of the Sun.
Theories predict that civilizations could utilize black holes as a source of power and slow down their time to survive the end of the universe. However, if protons are unstable, they begin to decay, and atoms disintegrate, erasing all the remaining degenerate matter in the universe.
With protons having completely decayed, the Black Hole Era begins. The universe contains "zombie galaxies" of black holes and light particles lounging around. Finally, binary black holes might come to life, releasing massive amounts of energy as gravitational waves when merging. In the year 159 novemdecillion, Hawking radiation finally makes the first black holes die. As they explode, they light back interstellar darkness. The universe then expands further by dark energy, which, if it persists at that time as it is now, will cause the universe to expand forever, making it colder, darker, and emptier.
Theories predict that civilizations, including humans, could create virtual or real-life universes of their own, looking at the possibility of a multiverse and evolution between universes. However, if escaping the universe is impossible, entropy will destroy the remaining black holes. The last black hole evaporates in the year 15 untrigintillion, making the universe become "nothing but a sea of photons gradually tending towards the same temperature as the expansion of the universe cools them towards absolute zero" according to Brian Cox. During this time, everything in the universe decays to nothing, making the universe end in the year one googol. When this happens, time no longer has any value.
File:Timelapse of the Future last scene.jpg|thumb|290x290px|The scene at the very end of the film, featuring the last black hole finally exploding and dying, emitting light in the universe one last time. Invisible light particles are simplified as stripes, similar in appearance to sperm. Red stripes represent heat.|alt=A bright, white sphere, emitting light and heat as it dies. The year is 38 billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion, and the event is "Last black hole evaporates."
After the short credits, a text appears that says "For Ash," the name of Boswell's son, who was born on January 1, 2019.
Production
Film
Production of the film started in mid-2018. On October 9, 2018, Boswell posted on his Twitter account an image of an early experiment of the film: a picture of an animated black hole. The screenshot differs from the final result absolutely: extremely huge year numbers were expressed with powers, there was no moving counter, and text was placed directly on the frame instead of on the lower hard matte. Not much has been stated about the production of the film, other than that "Creating it required months of research into physical cosmology, where speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are legion, and often contradictory." Boswell stated that he was inspired, "years ago," by the idea of the Sun nearing its death in five billion years, asking:What happens after that? What happens not in 5 billion years, but 5 trillion? The answers are out there, but they are piecemeal and not strung together in a compelling way. So I took the opportunity to create something unique that highlights our collective predictions about the future, both short-term and long-term.
Writing the concept first involved research and then constructing the timeline, which is "the scaffolding around which the visuals and music would be built." After writing, he then broke down the timeline to several, appropriate sequences.
Via the Long Now Foundation, he further explained:
My original plan was to make something more like an art installation piece where there wouldn't be so much talking and facts; it would basically just be the timeline and some chill music and meditative imagery of black holes that would just span for like 10 minutes at a time, and you'd get this abstract impression of how long the future is going to be, and how much emptiness there is. But the more I dug into it, the more I found there's so much to talk about, and so much to say, that it would be foolish to waste this opportunity. I had a draft of this , and felt it needed to be taken to the next level. So I spent another six months really digging into the VFX of it all, and the research, and figuring out how to build the flow of it and the structure and how to make it work. And I am glad I did. There's just so much to say, and so much I had to leave out. But it came together really well and I am pretty stoked about how it turned out.
Like his other films, animating and editing uses Cinema 4D, Octane Render, and Adobe After Effects. Closed captioning is made by volunteers from Amara and YouTube.
Boswell, like several of his films, was supported by computer scientist Juan Benet, thus having his company Protocol Labs, an open-source R&D lab, credited.
He also clarified that the film is in no way entirely and meant to be scientifically accurate, and that "It's guaranteed you're going to have to do a lot of speculation anyway, so I'm not too concerned about scientific accuracy when it's impossible to predict the future." In the film, he also disclosed, "We may not know for certain."
Sound and music
Boswell stated to have used several stock audio on Spitfire Audio, Komplete, 8dio, and Omnisphere as well rather than solely original soundtrack composed using Ableton Live; synths played using the Yamaha CS-80 and Moog Sub 37. Piano tunes were played by a Gulbransen upright, an instrument he repeatedly uses. He considers the album/LP, The Arrow of Time, to be his album with "unique sonic and musical challenges." He stated that the idea behind the theme is to "feel huge, open, at times lonely and eerie — in short, to reflect the future of the universe itself," and that he "also wanted to convey some sense of melancholy, as this story foretells the fate of our species in a pretty somber way." The soundtrack's first track, "Sun Mother," uses a 120 beats per minute rhythm, increasing as the time evolves to "highlight the accelerating rate of ." The music's timing is also taken into consideration, saying that "It was important to me to have moments where the music, visuals, and sound effects could breathe, and the viewer could take in what they have seen."The line between sound design and music is blurred throughout the experience. From the onset, the counter acts as a metronome driving the first piece of music. In many places, the deep rumbles of black holes take the place of synth bass lines, creating a symbiotic bond between the music and the visuals. I often didn't distinguish between whether I was sound designing or composing; it all came from the same place — the need to create a mood, a sense of being present at an alien time and place. The intensity and variety of the events, the interplay with the music all combined made it difficult to not get muddied into a sonic mess. It took very careful tweaking and sound selection to make it work I recall spending a couple days just on a 10-second span of sound and music.