Script-to-Movie: A Computational Framework for Story Movie Composition

Traditional movie production has always been a highly professional work that needs team collaboration, advanced devices and techniques, and vast time and money investment. These high threshold requirements not only prevent mass amateur enthusiasts entering this field, but also hinder professionals quickly previewing their conceived story plots. In this paper, we raise a novel application, named script-to-movie (S2M) composition, to automatically produce new movies from existing videos in accordance with user created script. Our motivation is to liberate producers from complex filming and editing operations, thereby people´s story idea can be instantly converted into the vivid movie video. To support the novel “What You Dream Is What You See” (WYDIWYS) production mode, we first propose a hierarchical alignment method to automatically construct a video material database with detailed semantic description. Considering diverse story plots in user designed script, the database contains abundant video materials about different characters appearing in various time and places conditions. On this basis, the S2M composition is formulated as a constrained optimization problem, where semantic story plot and syntactic visual content are synthetically considered to identify a group of optimal video segments to narrate the user designed script story. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results are reported to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed S2M application.