#21 Voter Inform

Inspiration

None of us knew what the president was doing, so we created a program that could report this with engaging video.

What it does and how we built it

Uses Selenium to scrape some of the top articles on the White House page. Uses Gemini to summarize the articles and write a script for Spongebob and Patrick to explain what happened. Uses Google Text-to-Speech to create an audio file and uses MoviePy to add background video and combine audio to create a short reel

Challenges we ran into

There were several challenges over the course of the project. The first was navigating a new web scraping tool like Selenium. Though some of us had prior web scraping experience, Selenium was relatively new to all of us. Another challenge was using AI to take the WhiteHouse.gov articles and convert them into a script that was more entertaining, but this was solved after trial and error through the use of different AI models. Our biggest problem was using MoviePy in Python, and combining the text, video, and characters all together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're most proud of having a finished product that was the culmination of our time and effort. The project was split up into 3 things that we were all new with. These were web scraping with Selenium, using Gemini to generate a script for our video, and creating a video with captions, the characters, and a background. Being able to try all the new things successfully, and come out with a finished project is something we are all proud of.

What we learned

We learned new technologies and frameworks, how to use version control effectively, how to work as a team in a hackathon, prioritizing which features to build, and having fun building a meaningful project.