Hui-Yin Wu

Analyzing Elements of Style in Annotated Film Clips

This paper presents an open database of annotated film clips together with an analysis of elements of filmic style related to how the shots are composed, how the transitions are performed between shots and how the shots are sequenced to compose a film unit. The purpose is to initiate a shared repository pertaining to elements of film style which can be used by computer scientists and film analysts alike. Though both research communities rely strongly on the availability of such information to foster their findings, current databases are either limited to low-level features (such as shots lengths, color and luminance information), contain noisy data, or are not available to the communities. The data and analysis we provide open exciting perspectives as to how computational approaches can rely more thoroughly on information and knowledge extracted from existing movies, and also provide a better understanding of how elements of style are arranged to construct a consistent message.

Logic Control for Story Graphs in 3D Game Narratives

With the rising popularity of engaging storytelling experiences in gaming arises the challenge of designing logic control mechanisms that can adapt to increasingly interactive, immersive, and dynamic 3D gaming environments. Currently, branching story structures are a popular choice for game narratives, but can be rigid, and authoring mistakes may result in dead ends at runtime. This calls for automated tools and algorithms for logic control over flexible story graph structures that can check and maintain authoring logic at a reduced cost while managing user interactions at runtime.

A Pattern-Based Tool for Creating Virtual Cinematography in Interactive Storytelling

In this work we design a tool for creators of interactive stories to explore the effect of applying camera patterns to achieve high level communicative goals in a 3D animated scenario. We design a pattern language to specify high level communicative goals that are translated into simple or complex camera techniques and transitions, and then flexibly applied over a sequence of character actions. These patterns are linked to a real-movie shot specification database through elements of context such as characters, objects, actions, and emotions. The use of real movies provides rich context information of the film, and allows the users of our tool to replicate the feel and emotion of existing film segments. The story context, pattern language and database are linked through a decision process that we call the virtual director, who reasons on a given story context and communicative goals, translates them into the camera patterns and techniques, and selects suitable shots from the database. Our real-time 3D environment gives the user the freedom to observe and explore the effect of applying communicative goals without worrying about the details of actor positions, scene, or camera placement.