Sketch-Based Dance Choreography

Sketching and doodling are two techniques commonly used by choreographers to design a dance sequence. These sketches usually represent the trajectory of the dancer in the scene. A set of annotations can be used to differentiate the various dance movements. In order to have more control over the choreographed dance, a 3D animation is preferable. This paper presents a novel sketch-based approach to assist dance choreographers authoring dance motions in a 3D environment. The proposed approach allows a choreographer to story board a dance using stick figure sketches of a dancer. Inspired by traditional choreography, a set of simple annotations is introduced for ballet. These annotations help to retrieve and blend ballet ´mini-motions´ in order to create a synthesized dance. To build the mini-motions, we have analyzed and processed several ballet movements available in a MoCap database.