NaMoGenMo

National Movie Generation Month - based on an idea based on an idea Darius Kazemi tweeted on a whim.

Hey, who wants to join me in NaNoGenMo: spend the month writing code that generates a 50k word novel, share the novel & the code at the end

Editions

The Goal

Spend the month of November writing code that generates a movie of 40+ minutes. This is in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month and the Academy's interesting definition of a feature film as 40 minutes.

The Rules

The only rule is that you share at least one movie and also your source code at the end.

The source code does not have to be licensed in a particular way, so long as you share it. The code itself does not need to be on GitHub, either. We're just using this repo as a place to organize the community. (Convenient because many programmers have GitHub accounts and the Issues section works like a forum with excellent syntax highlighting.)

The "movie" is defined however you want. It could be 40 minutes of a static picture of the word "meow". It could literally grab a random movie from Wikimedia Commons. It doesn't matter, as long as it's 40+ minutes.

Please try to respect copyright. We're not going to police it, as ultimately it's on your head if you want to just copy/paste a Stephen King movie or whatever, but the most useful/interesting implementations are going to be ones that don't engender lawsuits.

This activity starts at 12:01am GMT on Nov 1st and ends at 12:01am GMT Dec 1st.

How to Participate

Open an issue on the edition's repo and declare your intent to participate. If you already have some inkling of the kind of project you'll be doing, please title your issue accordingly. You may continually update the issue as you work over the course of the month. Feel free to post dev diaries, sample output, etc.

Also feel free to comment on other participants' issues.

Admins

The official admin for NaMoGenMo is @ryanfox. I'll be doing my best to keep the issues section well organized and tagged.

Resources

FFmpeg - a multi-purpose command line video editing/mixing/creation tool

MoviePy - a Python library for programatically creating and editing video

Wikimedia Commons - a repository of open videos, images, and sounds

There's an open issue for each edition where you can add resources (libraries, corpuses, APIs, techniques, etc).

That's It

Have fun!