Automated presentation planning of animation using task decomposition with heuristic reasoning

We describe ESPLANADE (Expert System for PLANning Animation, Design, and Editing), a knowledge-based animation presentation planner. ESPLANADE receives as input a script generated by a separate action planner and a set of communicative goals that specify what the animation is to communicate to the viewer. The presentation plan that ESPLANADE creates is a complete description of every frame of an animation and includes viewing specifications, viewport dimensions, and object properties. Instead of treating animation as a flat sequence of frames, our approach is to use a top-down task decomposition strategy with heuristic reasoning to build a frame-based semantic representation of an animation. The structure built by ESPLANADE is a hierarchy of sequences, scenes, and shots, based on a representation used by filmmakers . This approach allows the planning to be performed with contextual information that is inferred while building the semantic representation and results in a better animation . . We demonstrate our system with a detailed example of a generated animation.