A smart assistant for shooting virtual cinematography with motion-tracked cameras

This demonstration shows how an automated assistant encoded with knowledge of cinematography practice can offer suggested viewpoints to a filmmaker operating a hand-held motion-tracked virtual camera device. Our system, called Director's Lens, uses an intelligent cinematography engine to compute, at the request of the filmmaker, a set of suitable camera placements for starting a shot that represent semantically and cinematically distinct choices for visualizing the current narrative. Editing decisions and hand-held camera compositions made by the user in turn influence the system's suggestions for subsequent shots. The result is a novel virtual cinematography workflow that enhances the filmmaker's creative potential by enabling effcient exploration of a wide range of computer-suggested cinematographic possibilities.

@InProceedings\{LCRB11,
  author       = "Lino, Christophe and Christie, Marc and Ranon, Roberto and Bares, William",
  title        = "A smart assistant for shooting virtual cinematography with motion-tracked cameras",
  booktitle    = "ACM Mutlimedia (Technical Demonstration)",
  year         = "2011",
  publisher    = "ACM Press",
  url          = "http://localhost/Publications/2011/LCRB11"
}