The director's lens: an intelligent assistant for virtual cinematography

We present the Director's Lens, an intelligent interactive assistant for crafting virtual cinematography using a motion-tracked hand-held device that can be aimed like a real camera. The system employs an intelligent cinematography engine that can compute, at the request of the filmmaker, a set of suitable camera placements for starting a shot. These suggestions represent semantically and cinematically distinct choices for visualizing the current narrative. In computing suggestions, the system considers established cinema conventions of continuity and composition along with the filmmaker's previous selected suggestions, and also his or her manually crafted camera compositions, by a machine learning component that adapts shot editing preferences from user-created camera edits. The result is a novel workflow based on interactive collaboration of human creativity with automated intelligence that enables efficient exploration of a wide range of cinematographic possibilities, and rapid production of computer-generated animated movies.