Retale

Inspiration

Connecting people in a quirky and funny way!

What it does

Talk about a memory. Retale asks a quick follow-up question or two, then writes it, draws it, narrates it in your own cloned voice, animates it, and hands you a finished video to share.

How we built it

Next.js, Gemini for the script, fal for images and animation, ElevenLabs for the voice clone, ffmpeg to stitch it all together. Everything runs in the background so the app never just sits there spinning.

Challenges we ran into

Getting characters to actually look like themselves from scene to scene was the real fight — models love to invent a stray pair of glasses or swap someone's face entirely. We also chased down a nasty ffmpeg bug that made audio fades go dead silent, and a background-job bug that quietly ate a feature's output with no error at all.

What we learned

The AI part was the easy part. The hard part was everything around it — consistency, timing, and making a pipeline across three different providers feel like something you'd actually trust with a memory.

What's next

Letting more than one friend narrate the same memory, and a shared feed so a friend group builds one memory archive together instead of a bunch of separate ones.