Virtual Studio System and Facial Emotion-Expression

Directors of TV programs, commercial programs, etc. usually convey their intentions to actors and production staffs using storyboards. However, it is difficult to perfectly and strictly convey director’s intentions to them since storyboards indicate only moment images of scenes. Directors then need much time to convey their intentions. In order to solve such problems, a system to automatically generate animation storyboards: moving images, have been developed in this study. The system is called “Virtual Studio System”. The system analyzes a scenario written by a director in natural language and automatically creates moving images. The system enables one to easily change the result: moving images, by changing the scenario in natural language. In addition, a method to make facial expressions of characters in the virtual system has been developed. With this system, anyone can easily make and edit animation storyboards representing a scenario.