Lotus

Turning books into cinematic trailers in minutes. Browse and discover must-reads. Create, edit, or generate trailers all in one place, without any technical experience required.

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Inspiration

Through exploring multiple ideas from architectural 3D modelling to insider trading time difference analysis, we ended up being inspired by the one thing that was most relevant and prevalent in humans: attention span and social media usage. It seems that scrolling 4 hours of Instagram reels in a row straight isn't a problem for our age group. Yet, when we sit down for ten min to read a book, it becomes problematic. Understanding this, we spiralled down and looked into people's specific needs: a lack of motivation to read and research books. A detrimental loss of valuable lessons for literature and education.

Our name, Lotus, represents strength and resilience, a symbol of resisting the natural instincts of resorting to quick and easy entertainment. For our UI/UX, we specifically chose purple for the colour of our flower because it is the rarest colour in nature, a parallel to our mindset of hoping to challenge the norm. We chose lotus to grow on trees, a contradiction from their natural habitat.

What it does

Transforming written literature into motion, high-quality films.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS UI/UX: Radix UI, Lucide, GSAP, React Flow State: Zustand Auth/DB: Supabase Backend APIs: FastAPI, Uvicorn AI: Google Gemini, Railtracks Library: OpenCV, Pydantic, httpx, python-dotenv, websockets, librosa, numpy, scipy, Pillow Deploy: Vercel

Challenges we ran into

  • Coming up idea
  • Choosing technologies/frames
  • Deciding to target market
  • Finding reliable AI video generation tools that is affordable
  • Balancing quality and cost, maximizing our time and output

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • UI
  • Learning how to use agentic AI, power through the obstacles of learning new technological tools
  • Learning to do things very last minute, clutching up
  • Optimizing for the time we should go get food

What we learned

  • Power of friendship
  • Being able to filter through multiple technological ideas, similar to how you would when you're doing a start up

What's next for In progress

  • Thinking about making functions for specific target groups, e.g. seniors, people with specific disorders (dyslexia, autism).

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Updates

posted an update —

Accidentally committed something after the deadline by mistake (did not know claude was still going at it). The change though is very niche and functionally the same in the grand scheme of the project.

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