The Director's Lens: An Intelligent Assistant for Virtual Cinematography

Directors Lens is a new tool designed for animators and film directors to interactively explore a large collection of shots over their 3D animation, and rapidly create and compare multiple edits of the same animation. Designed in mind for virtual production and rapid prototyping of synthetic movies, the tool assists the filmmaker in exploring the cinematographic possibilities of his 3D scene.

The Directors Lens engine generates shots encoding classical framing rules related to shot size (such as long/medium/close-up/extreme close-up shots), shot type (internal, external, apex, parallel, subjective) and shot composition (gaze room, rule of the thirds). The engine also selects shots according to continuity editing rules (jump-cut, 180 rule, change in size, and motion continuity). The tool is now developed as a plugin in Motion Builder. The tool connects with Vicon Streaming plugin in order to let the user reframe selected shots, and shoot free camera motions using a Virtual Camera System.

The original version of Directors Lens has been co-developped by William Bares (College of Charleston, USA), Roberto Ranon, University of Udine, Marc Christie, University of Rennes and myself.

See white paper The Director's Lens: an intelligent assistant for virtual cinematography

A new version has been integrated into AutoDesk® Motion Builder® as a plugin, which has been developped by Emmanuel Badier and Marc Christie, mostly inspired by the manifold surface representation we proposed at the Symposium on Computer Animation 2012 with Marc Christie. See white paper Efficient Composition for Virtual Camera Control

This version has also been augmented with nice features to manipulate the framing of a shot directly in the image space. See white paper Intuitive and Efficient Camera Control with the Toric Space.

Illustrations and videos