ASAP: Auto-generating Storyboard And Previz with Virtual Humans

Abstract

We present a tool for Auto-generating Storyboard And Previz for screenwriters and filmmakers, called ASAP. Our system allows users to easily simulate their stories in the form of 3D animated/visual scenes with virtual humans in a virtual environment. We only ask users to write their script using Final Draft, an exclusive screen-writing tool, and upload them to our system. The uploaded script is parsed into paragraphs of the action, character, and dialogue. From those paragraphs (i.e., text data), our system uses a combination of deep learning, data-driven, and rule-based approaches to instantly generate virtual human's physical motions and co-speech gestures, presenting natural behavior/dialogue scenes. Thus, users can observe automatically generated pre-visualized animations (i.e., previz) from the script and can create the storyboard by capturing scenes being played. Our ASAP can minimize time-and-money consuming and labor-intensive work in the early stages of filmmaking, and do it as soon as possible. We believe that our tool and approach have a good potential for wide dissemination in the film industry.