VR as a Content Creation Tool for Movie Previsualisation
Abstract: Creatives in animation and film productions have forever been exploring the use of new means to prototype their visual sequences before realizing them, by relying on hand-drawn storyboards, physical mockups or more recently 3D modelling and animation tools. However these 3D tools are designed in mind for dedicated animators rather than creatives such as film directors or directors of photography and remain complex to control and master. In this paper we propose a VR authoring system which provides intuitive ways of crafting visual sequences, both for expert animators and expert creatives in the animation and film industry. The proposed system is designed to reflect the traditional process through (i) a storyboarding mode that enables rapid creation of annotated still images, (ii) a previsualisation mode that enables the animation of the characters, objects and cameras, and (iii) a technical mode that enables the placement and animation of complex camera rigs (such as cameras cranes) and light rigs. Our methodology strongly relies on the benefits of VR manipulations to re-think how content creation can be performed in this specific context, typically how to animate contents in space and time. As a result, the proposed system is complimentary to existing tools, and provides a seamless back-and-forth process between all stages of previsualisation. We evaluated the tool with professional users to gather experts’ perspectives on the specific benefits of VR in 3D content creation.
Authors: Quentin Galvane, I-Sheng Lin, Fernando Argelaguet, Tsai-Yen Li, Marc Christie
Supplementary material :
Storyboards : Given a scenario, a scene and some assets, user had to make a storyboard with our VR storyboard tool
Camera placement and editing : Given a storyboard and an existing animation, users had to place and animate cameras and perform the editing in VR
Animation and techvis: Given a set of assets and camera rigs users were asked to create a complete animation in VR
Expert Evaluations: In this experiment, we worked only with expert users, with at least five years of experience each in storyboarding, previsualisation and 3D animation for the movie industry, or technical preparation of movie shooting. After a demonstration and training stage, participants were given full freedom. No guidelines were given as to what to create; users had complete freedom to explore the features of the tools, yet they each had to design a simple sequence
Here are the questionnaires filled by each expert following their experiment.
