CineMap

Everyone has a story to tell

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Inspiration

Everyone has a story to tell

Yet, too many ideas that could shape culture and redefine the entertainment world never come to life.

Whether it's a director, a filmmaker, or your average Joe, sometimes our stories don’t get past ideation. Writer’s block, messy drafts, and the intimidating task of building a worthy narrative stop creators before they can finish. With CineMap, we want to bring those untold stories that could have changed the world to life.

What it does

CineMap lets users share their ideas, regardless of whether they're a built-out universe or capture a single plot point, and expands them into a fully-fledged storyboard, just like a screenwriter would.

How we built it

  • Initially planned out projects and MVP specs
  • Separated into teams to work on sets of features
  • Performed some initial research on transcription, audio playback, and Gemini voice API
  • Learned about Mermaid diagram creation tools
  • Agreed on UI/UX specs
  • Implemented features and debugged
  • Stress-tested

Challenges we ran into

  • Implementing audio features and connecting with Gemini’s API
  • Ran into some issues with creating a back-and-forth conversion using PyDub
  • Translating audio input into useful, specific flowchart data
  • Balancing autonomy and functionality
  • Automating flowcharts and summaries
  • Providing flexibility in editing flowcharts, character traits, and different storyboards

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Successfully implemented novel flow-chart creation tool
  • Created Mermaid parsing tool
  • (Not in final version) reconstructed conversation history to enable back-and-forth verbal conversation with Gemini, via a combination of Whisper-based transcription and PyDub to play audio on the device.
  • Built a beautiful and intuitive front-end, allowing for the quick creation of a movie storyboard.

What we learned

  • Delicate nature of storyboarding and its significance in show business
  • Learned about LangChain for agent creation
  • Progress made in on-device transcription (Whisper), and how to implement it our codebase
  • Learned about Gemini Live API and Gemini Speech Generation API
  • Learned about the pitfalls of codegen tools :)
  • How on-device audio playback works with Python

What's next for CineMap

CineMap has the potential to evolve into a full creative suite for narrative design. Future directions include real-time collaboration for teams, voice previews with AI voice actors, and support for multi-modal story generation (text, audio, visuals).

With continued development, it could become a go-to platform for both professional writers and indie creators to prototype, refine, and share stories across film, games, and interactive media.

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