Automatic e-movie creation of 3D animation and video retrieval

This paper describes a software system called EMM (electronic moviemaker) designed to visualize the user´s input screenplay words by a sound motion picture with the effects of real images, 3D animation, or their composition. A virtual director achieves the user´s intentions by a knowledge-based (KB) approach through setting a scene, determining the corresponding shot types and shot sequence, and planning virtual camerawork dependent on the cinematic expertise stored in a KB domain, where real images are extracted from digital video by applying advanced content-based retrieval techniques. Animation generation is automated by interpreting textual screenplay into the TVML language, and the resultant movie is showed on a TVML player.