Musicians and choreographers have long been able to express their intentions using logical symbolic structures (music notation and dance notation), yet those working in the movie industry and the games industry have to rely on cartoons and verbal description, and the only record of their artistry is the result itself. The film and games industries are converging in the way that their creative content is perceived by consumers; ANSWER will produce a notation system for describing the creation of multimedia content, thus offering a bridge between digital media production and animation for game design.

Development of a successful notation becomes appropriate today because of its dependence upon the parallel development of effective notation-based tools to support the artist in visualisation of their intention, communication to other members of the production team, and analysis of the production process, whilst still maintaining control of their creative intention.

To achieve our objective, in addition to the development of DirectorNotation to symbolically describe creative intention, ANSWER will develop tools for automatic generation of animated pre-visualisations for film and game pre-production from the notation itself and from metadata which is extracted from the Director's initial input. An interface will be created to allow the Director to work imaginatively with the notation as it is authored, and an iterative scheme is introduced to ensure that developments of ideas and the realities of the actual production are reflected in the final notation description. Professional users from the film production and games production industry are integral partners in the project, which will ensure that we work together towards a common goal and are not dominated by technological considerations before artistic needs.

ANSWER is supported by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Research Programme.

Project coordinator: Institute of Communications and Computer Systems, Greece
Project type: STREP
Start date: January 2008
Duration: 36 months