News

Overview

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 last version of the engine (released as SolidFrame) integrates our novel interaction metaphors with the viewpoints (on-screen composition) and the camera trajectories in the image-space (SIGGRAPH 2015).

The paper describing the work was presented at ACM Multimedia 2011:

• The Director's Lens: An Intelligent Assistant for Virtual Cinematography [acm] [hal] [videos] C. Lino, M. Christie, R. Ranon, W. Bares. In 19th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, 2011, Scottsdale Arizona, USA.

Screenshots and videos

Figure: Database of stereotypical viewpoints

Video: our old Ogre prototype (ACM Multimedia 2011)

Video: interactive image-space manipulation tools (SIGGRAPH 2015)

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