Our Approach

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.

     

Learn more about Director Notation! Click here to navigate to Director Notation site.

 

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.

Innovations
We've listed the key innovations of ANSWER project:

  • Construction of a semantic model of the director's art : a film production ontology;
  • An artistic notation system that will allow artists to describe film direction;
  • An extension of the notation system for game development;
  • Application of the machine-processable representation to automatically generate animated 3D 'pre-vis' storyboards;
  • Application of the machine-processable representation to automatically extract metadata that will allow content-based retrieval of raw footage during post production;
  • Synchronisation of the user's notation input to what is actually filmed;
  • Application of the machine processable representation to automatically generate 3D animation directives that can be integrated in a game engine, allowing artistic definition of cinematic presentation of content in computer games.

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

     
Image of woman at editing console. ANSWER metadata will speed content retrieval in post-production.
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