NaMoGenMo 2023 report
Over the month of November, I worked on a project to create code that generates a movie.
My project this year: see most exciting parts of a movie right away, and leave all those pesky slow, boring parts for the end. Bottom Line Up Front.
What parts of a movie are the most exciting? The one with the most on-screen motion, of course! We can BLUF-ize a movie by extracting the segments with the most movement in the whole video. Then the next most action, and so on until you are left with the slowest, most sedate parts.
So whenever you choose to stop, everything you've already seen is more exciting than what's left.
As a subject, I chose The Phantom of the Opera (1925), a silent film starring Lon Chaney as the Phantom. It was released in 1925, meaning it's in the public domain.
The code I wrote to generate the video is available on GitHub.
I am very pleased with how it turned out! It's choppy, but more or less intelligible. And having all dynamic shots front-loaded is pretty exciting. The final result: