A Notation Based Approach to Film Pre-vis

This paper describes ANSWER which is a new approach to the creative process of film production. It is based on a symbolic notation system called Director Notation (DN) through which film directors are free to express their creative intent much like a music composer uses musical notation. The notation populates a semantic model which is machine processable and this input is automatically converted into a lightweight 3D pre-vis. ANSWER is integrated with DFT BONES Dailies, so that in post-production editors can quickly synchronise and compare pre-vised and actual footage. In this paper we will describe the various software tools which have been developed as part of the ANSWER project to achieve this goal.