README.md

metadata

title: Chalchitra
emoji: 📽️
colorFrom: yellow
colorTo: gray
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 6.18.0
python_version: '3.13'
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
license: mit
short_description: a film for this moment
tags:
  - thousand-token-wood
  - best-demo
  - off-brand
  - track:wood
  - achievement:offgrid
  - achievement:offbrand
  - achievement:sharing
  - achievement:fieldnotes

Chalchitra · चलचित्र

A film for this moment. Bring up to four images and an optional fragment — a feeling, a line, or nothing at all — and Chalchitra reads the mood beneath them and names three films that belong to it. Not by genre or rating, but by the texture of a feeling.

A small vision model does the seeing, running on the Space itself — no cloud API in the loop. Stateless by design: refresh, and the moment is gone.

How it works

You drop in up to four images and, if you like, a fragment of text. A vision model reads the atmospheric and emotional texture — the quality of light, what moment in life this is — and returns a short interpretation plus three films, each with a felt rationale for why it belongs here. When you've typed a fragment, your words lead the reading. Ask again and you get a fresh set (it remembers what it has already shown you, this session only).

The tech

• Model: Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct (≤32B), run in-process on ZeroGPU — the model answering is the one on the Space, no hosted API.
• Frontend: a custom React interface (amber, polaroid, In the Mood for Love register) served from a Gradio app on the Space — a long way past the default Gradio UI.
• Backend: a pluggable LLM oracle behind a frozen JSON contract, with server-side image sanitisation, a bounded quality retry, and graceful failure states. Provider-swappable (LM Studio locally, in-Space model on deploy) without touching the frontend or the prompt.

Hackathon

• Track: An Adventure in Thousand Token Wood

• Badges: Best Demo · Off Brand — a genuinely custom React interface, served from the Gradio app and well beyond the default Gradio UI

• Demo video: https://youtu.be/GeBFQXVBqQs

• Social post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ajit3259_chalchitra-a-film-for-this-moment-activity-7471894016960344064-I1Au

• The story (how & why we built it): https://ajit3259.substack.com/p/chalchitra-a-film-for-this-moment

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Music in the demo: "Reverie" by Scott Buckley — CC-BY (scottbuckley.com.au). The opening frame is from the series Love Through Prism; the pencil drawing is the author's own.