The Spooky AI Hackathon ended recently, and the results were truly terrifying!
The challenge was simple: Combine Halloween with the power of Cloudinary’s technology. Over 140 developers embraced this opportunity, utilizing features like generative AI, dynamic overlays, and video generation to create some frightening and impressive projects.
In this blog post, we chatted with our 1st place winner, Pablo Cazorla, to learn more about his project: La Purga de Halloween.
Q: What’s your developer experience and background?
I am a specialized frontend and UI developer with solid experience in JavaScript, React JS, Next JS, HTML, and CSS. Additionally, I am a UX analyst and web/mobile designer, committed to creating exceptional user experiences and innovative web applications.
Q: What inspired you to create this project?
From the beginning, the project was focused on creating a strong, emotional impact on the viewer. The concept of a “purge” has already been explored in movies, books, TV series, etc., so it’s a familiar idea that fits well with the Halloween theme.
The ability to use Cloudinary’s AI tools to transform or distort a face into something monstrous or cadaverous gave me the idea of having users upload a photo of their own face, which significantly increases the impact.
Everything else involves using the right font (with keyboard typing sounds), a retro TV background with white noise, interference, etc.
One key element is the music: for that, I used a calm and mysterious piano melody by a composer, and for the surprise effect, I used a musical piece created with AI.
Q: Which Cloudinary features were essential to your project’s success?
I used GENERATIVE REPLACE, with the prompt:
from: “face” to: “dead zombie face with closed eyes;preserve-geometry_true”.
Q: Did you encounter any challenges while integrating Cloudinary into your project? How did you overcome them?
As a developer, my experience was excellent. It’s relatively easy to incorporate Cloudinary’s tools into the workflow. The integration with the API is very well documented. I didn’t really encounter any major difficulties.
Beyond uploading, La Purga de Halloween uses generative AI to change the user’s image to look like a zombie to give the effect of a casualty of The Purge. It’s built on Astro and, like other submissions, uses the Astro SDK to make it easy to create such a compelling experience.
Congratulations again to Pablo for his incredible work! To try La Purga for yourself, check out Pablo’s app and Github code.
Want to discuss the topic of this blog or chat with other developers about all things Cloudinary? Join the Cloudinary Community here or check out the Cloudinary Community’s Discord server.
