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 suit- able camera placements for starting a shot that represent semantically and cinematically distinct choices for visualiz- ing 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 efficient exploration of a wide range of computer-suggested cinematographic possibilities.