Generating Cinematic Camera Shots for Narratives

We have built a system that automatically generates camera actions for storytelling in virtual environments. Given a sequence of character actions, scene properties (like mood, tempo, etc), and a mapping from names to characters, objects, and locations in a graphical world, the goal of a camera planning system is to generate sequences of directives for the camera to satisfy derived from certain communicative goals that are input by the author. For this test case, we developed a specific implementation of the problem. For generating camera shot directives, we considered a library of character actions (specifically walk, say, and point/wave), attributes to annotate scenes, characters and stories, and communicative goals. For the demonstration we restricted ourselves to conversational settings within stories. Camera directives were generated by a planning system. The plan was then fed to a modified version of the Unreal Tournament 2003 game engine (hereafter as UT) where it was executed. Our choice of conversational setting enables us to compare and contrast the effect of feeding different parameters to the planning system for the same basic scene.