Tasty But Too Close

I've always enjoyed Tasty videos. They're quick and make the recipe look easy. I also always wanted to create a funny bot account. The idea of taking the familiar style of Tasty and Nifty videos, but zooming them in a little too close to see what's going on seemed funny to me.

The results are silly but also sometimes pretty artsy.

Development

Unfortunately, Instagram is difficult to work with programmatically, and I didn't want to run a server just for this project. Plus with all the free time during lockdown, I might as well just post them myself and revisit making a bot if it felt worthwhile.

Using Python and instaloader downloading software, I created a system to create cropped videos.

1. Batch download
2. Auto crop and write caption
3. Manually post using automatically copied caption

The main function of step 2 looks like this:

# crop.py
  for f in all_in_files:
    split = f.split(".", 1)

    # isCroppable: if the end is mp4 and has not been processed yet
    if isCroppable(split, f):

      # create a randomly cropped video
      crop_video(f)

      # get the caption with appended hashtags and copy it
      caption = get_caption(split[0])
      copy(caption)
      print('COPIED:\n' + caption + '\n')

      # log the video as cropped and posted
      log(f)

      break

Results

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Oh-ho yes