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A Smart Assistant for Shooting Virtual Cinematographywith Motion-Tracked Cameras

Christophe Lino, Marc Christie, Roberto Ranon, William Bares

To cite this version:Christophe Lino, Marc Christie, Roberto Ranon, William Bares. A Smart Assistant for ShootingVirtual Cinematography with Motion-Tracked Cameras. ACM Multimedia, Nov 2011, Scottsdale,United States. �hal-00646396�

A Smart Assistant for Shooting Virtual Cinematographywith Motion-Tracked Cameras

Christophe LinoIRISA/INRIA RennesCampus de Beaulieu

35042, Rennes Cedex, Francechristophe.lino@inria.fr

Marc ChristieIRISA/INRIA RennesCampus de Beaulieu

35042, Rennes Cedex, Francemarc.christie@inria.fr

Roberto RanonHCI Lab, University of Udine

via delle Scienze 20633100, Udine, Italy

roberto.ranon@uniud.it

William BaresMillsaps College

1701 North State St JacksonMS 39210

bareswh@millsaps.edu

ABSTRACTThis demonstration shows how an automated assistant en-coded with knowledge of cinematography practice can offersuggested viewpoints to a filmmaker operating a hand-heldmotion-tracked virtual camera device. Our system, calledDirector’s Lens, uses an intelligent cinematography engineto compute, at the request of the filmmaker, a set of suit-able camera placements for starting a shot that representsemantically and cinematically distinct choices for visualiz-ing the current narrative. Editing decisions and hand-heldcamera compositions made by the user in turn influencethe system’s suggestions for subsequent shots. The resultis a novel virtual cinematography workflow that enhancesthe filmmaker’s creative potential by enabling efficient ex-ploration of a wide range of computer-suggested cinemato-graphic possibilities.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsH.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems]: Animations,Video

KeywordsVirtual Cinematography, Motion-Tracked Virtual Cameras,Virtual Camera Planning

1. INTRODUCTIONCreating camera edits and movements for computer gen-

erated animation remains time-consuming and largely man-ual endeavor requiring cinematographic skill and experiencewith 3D animation packages. Some technically-savvy film-makers are now using motion-sensing devices to capture

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complex virtual camera movements rather than key-framingthe camera [1]. However, these existing devices operate asplugins to animation packages such as Maya that offer aninfinity of expressive animation power, but with a corre-sponding steep learning curve and an interface which is notdesigned around cinematographic concepts.

Researchers in automated virtual cinematography systemshave produced increasingly sophisticated algorithms thatcan generate virtual 3D camera work that mimics textbookguidelines [4, 2, 3]. But in succeeding to reduce human ef-fort, these automated systems also limit the input of creativehuman filmmakers and as a result produce cinematographyof little creative value. Our Director’s Lens system intro-duces a novel workflow that combines the creative humanintelligence with the computational power of an automatedcinematography system, to enable a filmmaker to explore avariety of automatically suggested virtual camera composi-tions (see Figure 2), that represent a variety of cinematicallydistinct ways one might film a given shot and which are con-sistent in user-specified continuity properties with the previ-ous shot. For computing its suggestions, the system exploitsan annotated screenplay which provides the narrative con-text in the form of text descriptions of locations, subjects,and time-stamped actions, with links to the 3D models em-ployed in the scene. Moreover, the system tries to mimicuser’s composition from previous shots.

With the help of a motion-tracked virtual camera (seeFigure 1), the cinematographer can easily refine and usethe suggestions as a starting point to craft his or her owncinematic compositions. Consequently, the expert is able torapidly consider many more alternatives and the novice isguided towards options that conform to established cinemaconvention.

2. NOVELTY AND BENEFITSThis demonstration represents the very first coupling be-

tween motion-tracked camera devices – a fundamental tech-nique in virtual cinematography – and automated viewpointcomputation to support a filmmaker in his creative choices.The demonstration highlights both the creative potential thetool provides (movies can be made very rapidly) and the easeto play and explore the cinematic possibilities of a scenario.

Previous ShotLast Frame

Number of suggestions with

Extreme Long Shot, High Angle

CinematographicFilters

Suggestions with Close-Up Shot Length

Suggestions with Low

Camera Angle

Currently selected suggestion

Figure 2: Screenshot of the interface in Explore Suggestions mode. The Line of Interest visual filter isselected, and thus only suggestions respecting the line of interest with respect to the previous shot last frame(pictured in the bottom left) are visualized.

Figure 1: Our hand-held virtual camera device withcustom-built dual handgrip rig and button controls,a 7-inch LCD touch-screen.

3. DEMONSTRATIONIn this interactive demonstration of our Director’s Lens

system, a user operates a small hand-held touchscreen LCDscreen equipped with motion sensors and custom-built but-ton and joystick controls (see Figure 1) to record virtualcamera movements (i.e., shots) to visualize a recreation of ascene from Michael Radford’s film version of Orwell’s 1984.The application runs on a notebook PC with a USB cableto communicate with the device’s buttons, joysticks, andtouchscreen, and an HDMI cable to mirror the PC’s displayon the handheld LCD. Three optical motion capture cam-eras mounted on tripods track the position and orientationof a rigid body marker cluster affixed to the device, which

in turn map to the position and orientation of the virtualcamera. We will also show a second version built from aMicrosoft XBOX 360 gamepad and the same type of LCDtouchscreen, but with a gyroscope sensor to drive cameraorientation and the gamepad thumb sticks the camera’s po-sition.

A user can record a movie by iterating the following work-flow: (i) identify the instant in the movie produced so farwhere a cut should be introduced (initially, at the beginningof the animation); (ii) ask the system to compute suggestionto start a new shot; (iii) browse the suggestions by cinematicproperties (see Figure 2); (iv) choose the one that is closestto what the user likes; (v) possibly aim the virtual cameradevice to refine the composition, and start shooting, mov-ing the the device like a real camera. An alternative, simplerworkflow can very rapidly produce a sequence of static shotsby simply exploring and selecting suggestions, without usingthe tracked device.

When browsing suggestions the user explore variations inshot distance, height, and angle in addition to whether ornot suggestions conform to or differ from the previous shot incontinuity, size, and angle. In this way the user can rapidlyexplore many different possible ways to film a given shotand assume manual control to improve upon the system’scompositions and movements.

4. REFERENCES[1] Autodesk. The new art of virtual moviemaking.

Autodesk whitepaper, 2009.

[2] D. Elson and M. Riedl. A lightweight intelligent virtualcinematography system for machinima generation. In3rd Conference on AI for Interactive Entertainment(AIIDE), 2007.

[3] C. Lino, M. Christie, F. Lamarche, G. Schofield, andP. Olivier. A Real-time Cinematography System forInteractive 3D Environments. In ACMSIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on ComputerAnimation, pages 139–148. Eurographics Association,2010.

[4] S. McDermott, J. Li, and W. H. Bares. Storyboardframe editing for cinematic composition. In 7thinternational conference on Intelligent user interfaces,pages 206–207. ACM Press, 2002.