A “work-in-progress concept” where the ultimate goal was a website where a user could choose a movie, choose a movie genre, and "auto-magically" generate a trailer for that movie in that specific genre. Collaborating with Miguel Bermudez, we chose the film “Jaws” as our test case and attempted to computer-generate a “Romantic Comedy” trailer for the film. The video below, which was part computer-generated and part human-curated, is a demonstration of what we were working towards.
We began by creating a back-end data structure through Python that allowed us to deconstruct and rebuild the text of the film (and ideally any other film). We then devised a story template for romantic comedies that could be applied to the film. We also built a corpus of text to computer-generate the lines for the voice-over narrator.
This was our final project for Allison Parish's Spring 2012 Reading & Writing Electronic Text" class at NYU ITP. More extensive project documentation and code can be found in the following archived blog posts: