Awestruck Bot was a product of a vision I had for a Discord bot that could turn arbitrary sentences in to procedurally generated humor, and an interest and learning Remotion.

The first major component is a bot framework designed to automatically catalogue remotion projects for invocation, and provide a way for users to take a message from Discord and pass it as an input to the projects. Using slash commands, it’s as simple as a user right-clicking on a message, hovering over apps, and choosing the video template they want.

Next is the main video generator I designed, taking inspiration from a category of videos called “Fiber Optic Cable Core”. It runs the message through a series of stages to produce videos that have a very random quality to them. First it uses a part-of-speech analysis library to extract noun groups that it can isolate in to sections. Next, it uses a local TTS with odd settings set to read out the text in a voice that seems to have a lot of randomness applied. Then it feeds all the noun groups to the Pexels API to get random stock images roughly corresponding to the groups. Finally, it sequences the video, alternating between reading the message content, and then reading the noun groups very slowly while showing the stock image with a filter applied that makes them look ethereal. This whole process results in a video that is seemingly random and has some funny elements to it.