MANIFESTO

Inspiration:

MANIFESTO was inspired by how difficult it can be to stay motivated during a health journey. One of our teammates, who lost 80 pounds in less than a year, and through that experience she realized that staying consistent is often harder than starting. A lot of people begin with strong motivation, but results take time, and health goals can start to feel far away. We wanted to create something more personal than a checklist or a regular vision board. That is why we built MANIFESTO: an AI-powered vision board app that helps people visualize their future self, stay connected to their goals, and remember why they started.

What it does

MANIFESTO is an AI-powered vision board that turns a user’s health goals into a short, motivational future-self video. The app asks a few simple questions about the user’s goals, habits, challenges, and how they want to feel. Then it creates a positive story around the person they are becoming. For example, if someone says they feel lazy or their sleep schedule is off, MANIFESTO does not focus on that negatively. It reframes it into a better future habit, like taking daily walks, sleeping on time, drinking more water, eating balanced meals, or feeling more energized. The final result is a personalized video with AI-generated visuals, captions, and voice narration. After watching it, users can customize the video by adding one more habit or goal.

How we built it

We built MANIFESTO with a React frontend and a Node.js/Express backend. The frontend handles the chat-style questions, video player, customization flow, and browser-based voice narration. On the backend, we used Claude to turn the user’s answers into structured story scenes. Each scene includes a title, image prompt, caption, and positive voiceover line. We used Stability AI to generate the images and FFmpeg to combine them into a short animated video with zoom effects and captions. We also added saved sessions so users can come back after generating a video, customize their story, and regenerate an updated version.

Challenges we ran into

Another challenge was image generation. Some images were too vague, inconsistent, or did not clearly show the habit we wanted. We adjusted the prompts to make the visuals more action-based, like a person walking, exercising, sleeping on time, or preparing a healthy meal. We also ran into real technical issues during development, including API credit limits, audio generation problems, FFmpeg errors, and syncing the frontend with the backend flow. We had to make quick decisions, like using browser text-to-speech when external audio APIs were not reliable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we built a complete working pipeline from user input to a generated video. A user can answer questions, get a personalized future-self story, watch it as a video, hear narration, and then customize it after seeing the result. We are also proud that the app feels personal. It is not just a generic fitness app or another checklist. It takes something the user is struggling with and turns it into a positive, visual reminder of who they are working toward becoming.

What we learned

We learned that building with AI is not just about calling an API. The way you ask the AI matters a lot. Small changes in prompts changed the tone, quality, and usefulness of the final video. We also learned how many pieces have to work together to create a smooth experience: frontend state, backend routes, AI text generation, image generation, video stitching, captions, narration, and session saving. Most importantly, we learned that storytelling can make personal goals feel more emotional and easier to connect with.

What's next for MANIFESTO

Next, we want to make MANIFESTO more customizable. Users should be able to choose their voice style, visual theme, video length, and tone. We also want to improve image consistency, add better avatar support, and eventually use more advanced video generation instead of only animated images. Long term, MANIFESTO could expand beyond health and fitness into career goals, confidence, lifestyle, and mental wellness. The bigger vision is to help people not only imagine their future self, but stay connected to that future every day.