HumbleBrag

Inspiration

We’ve all seen them: the LinkedIn posts that are 1% project update and 99% "I am the chosen one." We wanted to solve the problem of excessive trumpets and revelry by injecting a healthy dose of cinematic humility into professional updates. Inspired by the epic, high-stakes energy of BlockBuster movie trailers, we decided to turn the 24-hour hackathon project into a narrative about trials, tribulations, and the sweet spot of self-celebration.

What it does

HumbleBrag is your personal PR manager for the AI age. You paste in your enthusiastic LinkedIn draft, choose your video style (Movie or Sports themed) and upload a headshot, from which the app then generates a cinematic video starring a "Disney-fied" version of you crushing it. It replaces your loud flexes with a relevant yet entertaining humble brag that highlights your hard work without losing the celebration. After all, there's never a bad time for a self-generated AI video celebrating your 24-hour project, right?

How we built it

We developed a multimodal generation framework that stitches together several AI tools:

• OpenAI DALL-E 3: Used to transform user headshots into adorable, consistent Disney-style avatars.
• OpenAI Sora 2: Our core engine for generating the video sequences and bringing the avatars to life.
• ElevenLabs: Integrated for "vibeless" text-to-voice narration, ensuring the audio is crisp and free of the typical artifacts found in early-gen video audio.
• BlockBuster Templates: We modeled our script and storyboard logic after classic movie trailer structures to ensure maximum dramatic effect.

Other technologies used included Next.js and Tailwind CSS for the sleek and responsive user interface, making the process of uploading headshots and drafting posts seamless. We integrated Supabase as our central data and storage layer, which handles the secure storage of user headshots, the intermediate video chunks generated, and the final combined video file. The entire application is hosted on Vercel, allowing us to leverage edge functions and a robust CI/CD pipeline for fast, reliable deployments.

Challenges we ran into

The limitation of generating the entire video in a single shot was a huge technical hurdle as the model struggled to strictly adhere to our storyboard template and drifted out of sync with the ElevenLabs audio. To solve this, we pivoted to a modular approach: we generated the video and audio in discrete thematic sections and then programmatically combined them at the end. Additionally, ensuring character consistency for the Disney-fied avatar across these different segments required significant prompt engineering and fine-tuning. Lastly, syncing the high-quality ElevenLabs audio with Sora 2 video output to avoid aural errors while maintaining the right tone was a delicate balancing act.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of our Disney avatar likeness system. It successfully captures the user's essence and keeps it consistent across the entire video. We also successfully identified and hit the "sweet spot" of humble bragging on LinkedIn: creating content that is relevant, entertaining, and doesn't feel like a typical corporate shout-into-the-void.

What we learned

This project was a masterclass in orchestrating complex multimodal AI workflows. We learned that piping the output of one generative model into another, such as using DALL-E 3 for character seeding and Sora 2 for motion, requires a robust "glue" layer to maintain state and visual identity. We gained significant experience in managing the asynchronous nature of these high-latency APIs, specifically how to handle parallel processing for audio and video sections to reduce total generation time. Most importantly, we learned that complex AI generation is often more reliable when broken down into modular components rather than attempting a single black box generation.

What's next for HumbleBrag

Our next step is improving HumbleBrag to help generate better datasets for even more varied video styles. We also want to expand our library of storyboard templates beyond movie trailers and sports commentary: think "Wildlife Documentaries" for your next hackathon win or job update.

Built With

• elevenlabs
• next.js
• openai
• supabase
• tailwindcss
• vercel