Creation of computer animation from story descriptions

. This thesis describes a computer system that creates simple computer animation in response to high-level, vague, and incomplete descriptions of films. It makes its films by collecting and evaluating suggestions from several different bodies of knowledge. The order in which it makes its choices is influenced by the focus of the film. Difficult choices are postponed to be resumed when more of the film has been dete.rmined. The system was implemented in an object-oriented language based upon computational entities called "actors". The goal behind the construction of the system is that, whenever faced with a choice, it sensibly choose between alternatives. based upon the description of the film and as much general knowledge as possible. The system is ·presented as a computational model of creativily and aesthetics. Name and Title of Thesis Supervisor: Carl Hewitt, Associate Professor of Computer Science