Toward intelligent support of authoring machinima media content: story and visualization

The Internet and the availability of authoring tools have enabled a greater community of media content creators, including nonexperts. However, while media authoring tools often make it technically feasible to generate, edit and share digital media artifacts, they do not guarantee that the works will be valuable or meaningful to the community at large. Therefore intelligent tools that support the authoring and creative processes are especially valuable. In this paper, we describe two intelligent support tools for the authoring and production of machinima. Machinima is a technique for producing computer-animated movies through the manipulation of computer game technologies. The first system we describe, ReQUEST, is an intelligent support tool for the authoring of plots. The second system, Cambot, produces machinima from a pre-authored script by manipulating virtual avatars and a virtual camera in a 3D graphical environment.

[1]  R. Schank,et al.  Inside Computer Understanding , 1981 .

[2]  Michael G. Dyer,et al.  BORIS - An Experiment in In-Depth Understanding of Narratives , 1983, Artif. Intell..

[3]  T. Trabasso,et al.  Causal relatedness and importance of story events , 1985 .

[4]  A. Graesser,et al.  Question answering in the context of stories , 1991 .

[5]  Ashwin Ram,et al.  AQUA: Questions that drive the explanation process , 1993 .

[6]  Steven M. Drucker,et al.  Intelligent Camera Control in a Virtual Environment , 1994 .

[7]  Valerie J. Shute,et al.  Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Past, Present, and Future. , 1994 .

[8]  M. Csíkszentmihályi.  Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention , 1996 .

[9]  David Salesin,et al.  The virtual cinematographer: a paradigm for automatic real-time camera control and directing , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[10]  David Salesin,et al.  Declarative Camera Control for Automatic Cinematography , 1996, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 1.

[11]  Robert McKee,et al.  Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting , 1997 .

[12]  James C. Lester,et al.  Intelligent multi-shot visualization interfaces for dynamic 3D worlds , 1998, IUI '99.

[13]  Richard J. Gerrig,et al.  A developmental perspective on the construction of disbelief. , 1998 .

[14]  Bruce Blumberg,et al.  Expressive autonomous cinematography for interactive virtual environments , 2000, AGENTS '00.

[15]  Patrick Olivier,et al.  CamPlan: A Camera Planning Agent , 2000 .

[16]  Robert Michael Young,et al.  Towards an architecture for intelligent control of narrative in interactive virtual worlds , 2003, IUI '03.

[17]  N. Badler,et al.  Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment , 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[18]  Mark O. Riedl,et al.  Narrative generation: balancing plot and character , 2004 .

[19]  Elliot Smith,et al.  Representation, Coherence and Inference , 2004, Artificial Intelligence Review.

[20]  Erik T. Mueller,et al.  Understanding script-based stories using commonsense reasoning , 2004, Cognitive Systems Research.

[21]  J. Schaeffer,et al.  ScriptEase: generative design patterns for computer role-playing games , 2004, Proceedings. 19th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2004..

[22]  Arnav Jhala,et al.  Branching Storylines in Virtual Reality Environments for Leadership Development , 2004, AAAI.

[23]  Robert Michael Young,et al.  A Discourse Planning Approach to Cinematic Camera Control for Narratives in Virtual Environments , 2005, AAAI.

[24]  Todd Lubart,et al.  How can computers be partners in the creative process: Classification and commentary on the Special Issue , 2005, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[25]  Robert Michael Young,et al.  An Objective Character Believability Evaluation Procedure for Multi-agent Story Generation Systems , 2005, IVA.

[26]  Brian Magerko,et al.  Scribe: A Tool for Authoring Event Driven Interactive Drama , 2006, TIDSE.

[27]  Wolfgang Müller,et al.  Towards Accessible Authoring Tools for Interactive Storytelling , 2006, TIDSE.

[28]  Kathleen McKeown,et al.  A Platform for Symbolically Encoding Human Narratives , 2007, AAAI Fall Symposium: Intelligent Narrative Technologies.

[29]  Mark O. Riedl,et al.  A Lightweight Intelligent Virtual Cinematography System for Machinima Production , 2007, AIIDE.