NewsReel

Inspiration

Tech develops at a rapid pace and there is a need to stay updated for professionals. Reading tech newsletters like TLDR feels like homework. The information is useful but nobody actually has time to sit down and read paragraphs. We wanted to see if we could make the same content more watchable and honestly more fun.

What it does

NewsReel pulls daily stories from TLDR and turns each one into a short AI-generated cartoon video. Swipe right to save a story and link to the full article, swipe left to skip.

How we built it

Scraped TLDR for daily stories, used Claude to write a video script for each one, then called the Pika 2.2 API via fal.ai to generate the cartoon video. FastAPI backend, Next.js frontend, stories stored in a JSON file. Videos are pre-generated in a batch so the feed loads instantly.

Challenges we ran into

Getting Pika to consistently match a visual style took a lot of prompt iteration. More time was spent than we should have figuring out that pika.art and fal.ai are two different things, one is the consumer app, the other is the actual API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the full pipeline working end to end scraping a real newsletter, generating a script with Claude, and producing an actual cartoon video with Pika

What we learned

Writing good prompts for video generation is harder than it looks. Specificity is important, vague prompts get generic videos that might not match the actual news content.

What's next for NewsReel

Support for any newsletter URL, more theme options, and a mobile app where the swipe feels more natural.

Built With

• claude
• fastapi
• next.js
• pika