Angelos Yannopoulos
Skip Abstract Section
Abstract
DirectorNotation (DN) is a symbolic language intended to express the content of film (motion pictures), much as notes provide a language for the writing of music. It thus constitutes a new approach to the creative process of filmmaking. Musicians, and also choreographers, have long been able to express their creative choices using logical symbolic structures (music notation and dance notation), yet those working in the movie industry have to rely on cartoons and verbal description. Development of a successful notation becomes appropriate today because of its dependence upon the parallel development of effective notation-based software tools such as visualisation (automatic animated storyboard generation), production budget estimation, and automated rough editing of dailies. Directors maintain complete control of their creative decisions when using DN. It is an artistic language supported by technical tools for planning and analysis. The notation is not merely a graphical user interface for these tools, and the tools are never intended to make decisions for the director. This article introduces DN, argues its great cultural significance, provides market research results showing directors' interest in using it, and reports on two controlled experiments confirming its effectiveness—including its usability in a practical context and its ability to represent and communicate the necessary information.
- Arijon, D. 1976. Grammar of the Film Language. Focal Press.Google Scholar
- Bares, W., Mcdermott, S. Boudreaux, C., and Thainimit, S. 2000. Virtual 3D camera composition from frame constraints. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Multimedia. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Baumeister, J., Reutelshoefer, J., and Puppe, F. 2011. KnowWE: a Semantic Wiki for knowledge engineering. Appl. Intell. 35, 3, 349--378. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Beales, R., Chakravarthy, A., Hedtke, R., Jung, C., Jung, Y., Koutsoutos, S., and Yannopoulos, A. 2009. Automated 3D Pre-Vis for modern production. In Proceedings of the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC).Google Scholar
- Benesh R. and Benesh, J. 1983. Reading Dance: The Birth of Choreology. McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
- Blinn, J. 1988. Where am I? What am I looking at? IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 8, 4, 76--81. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bordwell, D. 1989. A Case for cognitivism. Iris 9, 11--40.Google Scholar
- Bordwell, D. 2000. Cognitive film theory. www.geocities.com/david_bordwell/cognitive.htm.Google Scholar
- Brewster, C., O'Hara, K., Fuller, S., Wilks, Y., Franconi, E., Musen, M. A., Ellman, J., and Shum, S. B. 2004. Knowledge representation with ontologies: The present and future, IEEE Intell. Syst. 19, 1, 72--81. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Browne, P. 2009. JBoss Drools Business Rules. Packt Publishing. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Callaway, C. B., Not, E., Novello, A., Rocchi, C., Stock, O., and Zancanaro, M. 2005. Automatic cinematography and multilingual NLG for generating video documentaries. Artif. Intell, 165, 1, 57--89. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Calvert, T. W., Wilke, L., Ryman, R., and Fox, I. 2005. Applications of computers to dance. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 25, 2, 6--12. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Carney, R. 1994. The Films of John Cassavetes. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- Cattelan, R. G., Teixeira, C., Goularte, R., and Pimentel, M. D. G. C. 2008. Watch-and-comment as a paradigm toward ubiquitous interactive video editing. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl. 4, 4, 1--24. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chakravarthy, A., Beales, R., Walland, P., and Yannopoulos, A. 2009. ANSWER: A semantic approach to film direction. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chang, S. F., Sikora, T., and Puri, A. 1999. Overview of the MPEG-7 Standard. IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. 11, 6, 1--18. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Christianson, D. B., Anderson, S. E., He, L., Salesin, D. H., Weld, D. S., and Cohen, M. F. 1996. Declarative camera control for automatic cinematography. In Proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence 1, 148--155. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Christie, M., Machap, R., Normand, Jm., Olivier, P., and Pickering, J. 2005. Virtual camera planning: A survey. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Smart Graphics. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chua, T. S. and Ruan, L. Q. 1995. A video retrieval and sequencing system. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 13, 4, 373--407. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cramer, B. and Kastens, U. 2009. Animation automatically generated from simulation specifications. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dasiopoulou, S., Tzouvaras, V., Kompatsiaris, I., and Strintzis, M. G. 2010. Enquiring MPEG-7 based ontologies. Multimedia Tools Appl. 46, 2, 331--370. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Davis, M., Heer, J., and Ramirez, A. 2003. Active capture: Automatic direction for automatic movies. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Multimedia. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Davis, M. 1993. Media Streams: An iconic visual language for video annotation. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages. 196--202.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Davis, M. 1994. Knowledge representation for video. In Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on AI. 120--127. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Davis, M. 2003. Editing out video editing, IEEE Multimedia, 10, 2, 54--64. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eisenstein, S. 1969. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Harcourt.Google Scholar
- Friedman, D. A. and Feldman, Y. A. 2006. Automated cinematic reasoning about camera behavior. Expert Syst. Appl. 30, 4, 694--704. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gottlieb, S. (Ed.). 1997. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews. University of California Press.Google Scholar
- Gruber, T. R. 1993. Translation approach to portable ontology specification. Knowl. Acquis. 5, 199--220. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Guiraud, P. 1975. Semiology. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.Google Scholar
- Honthaner, E. L. 2010. The Complete Film Production Handbook. Focal Press.Google Scholar
- Hutchinson Guest, A. 1987. Labanotation: The System of Analyzing and Recording Movement. Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
- Jung, Y., Wagner, S., Jung, C., Behr, J., and Fellner, D. 2010. Storyboarding and pre-visualization with X3D. In Proceedings of ACM Web3D. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katz, S. 1991. Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen. Michael Wiese Productions.Google Scholar
- Li, T. Y., Cheng, C. C. 2008. Real-time camera planning for navigation in virtual environments. In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Smart Graphics. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lino, C., Christie, M., Ranon, R., and Bares, W. 2011. The director's lens: An intelligent assistant for virtual cinematography. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM). 323--332. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Löthwall, L. O. 1968. An interview with Ingmar Bergman. Take One 2, 1, 16--18.Google Scholar
- Madhwacharyula, C. L., Davis, M., Mulhem, P., and Kankanhalli, M. S. 2006. Metadata handling: A video perspective. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl. 2, 4, 358--388. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mascelli, J. V. 1965. The Five Cs of Cinematography. Cine/Grafic Publications.Google Scholar
- Milton, N. R. 2007. Knowledge Acquisition in Practice: A Step-by-step Guide. Springer. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pickering, J. H., and Olivier, P. 2003. Declarative Camera Planning Roles and Requirements. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2733, 182--191. Springer. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Plemenos, D. 2009. Declarative modeling in computer graphics. In Studies in Computational Intelligence: Intelligent Scene Modelling Information Systems 181, 29--58. Springer.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Preston-Dunlop, V. and Sanchez-Colberg, A. 2002. Dance and the Performative. Verve Publishing.Google Scholar
- Proferes, N. T. 2005. Film Directing Fundamentals: See Your Film Before Shooting 2nd Ed. Focal Press.Google Scholar
- Richards, D. 2004. Addressing the ontology acquisition bottleneck through reverse ontological engineering. Knowl. Inform. Syst. 6, 402--427.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schreiber, A. T., Akkermans J. M., Anjewierden, A., De Hoog, R., Shadbolt, N., Van De Velde, W., and Wielinga, B. 2000. Knowledge Engineering and Management: The CommonKADS Methodology. MIT Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shadbolt, N. R. 2005. Eliciting Expertise, Evaluation of Human Work 3rd Ed. Taylor and Francis.Google Scholar
- Shen, J., Aoki, T., Yasuda, H., and Miyazaki, S. 2004. E-movie creation by rule-based reasoning from the director's viewpoint - e-movie: Computer animation & real images. In Proceedings of the IEE EWIMT.Google Scholar
- Stockwell, P. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. Routledge.Google Scholar
- Stokes, M. 2001. Managing Engineering Knowledge: MOKA Methodology for Knowledge Based Engineering Applications. Professional Engineering Publishing.Google Scholar
- Studer, R., Benjamins, V. R., and Fensel, D. 1998. Knowledge engineering: Principles and methods. Data Knowl. Eng. 25, 161--197. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sutton, V. 1997. DanceWriting for Modern and Jazz Dance. The Center For Sutton Movement Writing, Spiral edition.Google Scholar
- Tarkovsky, A. 1989. Sculpting Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art. University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
- Thompson, P. Lectures. 1990. www.chicagomediaworks.com/2instructworks/3editing_doc/3editingeisenstein.html# filmic.Google Scholar
- Tomlinson, B., Blumberg, B., and Nain, D. 2000. Expressive autonomous cinematography for interactive virtual environments. In Proceedings of Agents. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Trescak, T., Esteva, M., and Rodriguez, I. 2010. A virtual world grammar for automatic generation of virtual worlds. Vis. Comput. 26, 521--531. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Weston, J. 1996. Directing Actors. Studio City, Michael Weise Productions.Google Scholar
- Wilke, L., Calvert, T., Ryman, R., and Fox, I. 2005. From dance notation to human animation: The LabanDancer project. J. Vis. Comput. Animation, 16, 3--4, 201--211. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yannopoulos, A., Christodoulou, Y., Koutsoutos, S., Savrami, K., Varvarigou, T., and Alexandrou, V. 2009. ANSWER: Documentation, formal conceptualisation and annotation of new media. In Adjunct Proceedings of Euro ITV.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- DirectorNotation: Artistic and technological system for professional film directing
Recommendations
Registers as inventions: body, dance, memory and digital medias
MOCO '18: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Movement and ComputingThis PHD research aims to map and study a selection of artistic propositions that use digital interfaces to deal with creations related to body, dance, memory and archives. The focus is on how new technologies are affecting the process of creation, ...
JSPad: a sign language writing tool using SignWriting
IUCS '09: Proceedings of the 3rd International Universal Communication SymposiumSignWriting is a practical writing system for sign languages. In this paper we present a software program, JSPad, for writing Japanese sign language (JSL) with SignWriting. SignWriting has a large set of visually iconic symbols that represent handshapes,...
Model-driven engineering with domain-specific meta-modelling languages
Domain-specific modelling languages are normally defined through general-purpose meta-modelling languages like the MOF. While this is satisfactory for many model-driven engineering (MDE) projects, several researchers have identified the need for domain-...
Comments