NovelTease

Inspiration

Books are powerful, but they’re hard to show. On platforms driven by video, authors are stuck describing stories that deserve to be seen. We wanted to make it easy to turn written imagination into something cinematic, without needing video-editing skills or big budgets.

What it does

NovelTease turns a book synopsis or excerpt into a short cinematic trailer. It automatically creates visuals, narration, music, and captions, then stitches everything into a vertical video that’s ready to watch and share.

How we built it

We built a clean pipeline where AI handles the creative thinking, and code handles structure and reliability. A language model plans the trailer, image and audio models generate assets, and FFmpeg assembles everything into a polished video. No video-generation models—just smart composition.

Challenges we ran into

Getting audio and video to stay perfectly in sync was harder than expected. Small mistakes caused infinite music loops or silent videos. We also had to make sure the AI’s output stayed structured and predictable, especially under hackathon time pressure.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

The system works end to end, every time. You can generate a complete trailer in one flow without manual fixes. It’s fast, reliable, and demo-ready—exactly what we set out to build.

What we learned

Reliability matters more than flashy features. Simple, deterministic systems produce better results than clever but fragile ones. We also learned that good pacing and audio balance can make even simple visuals feel cinematic.

What’s next for NovelTease

We want to improve visual motion, add style presets for different genres, and refine captions and transitions. Longer-term, NovelTease could become a standard tool for authors to preview and market their stories visually before the book is even published.

Built With

• elevenlabs
• fastapi
• ffmpeg
• gemini
• mongodb
• nextjs
• openai
• python
• typescript