ANSWER: A Semantic Approach to Film Direction

In this paper we present ANSWER, an innovative approach to film direction. Here we describe a methodology to semantically model the film domain in a way which is coherent with the director’s intent during film production. To achieve this, we are developing a system architecture which will provide the director with the necessary tools and services to author a scene description through intuitive gesture based graphical user interfaces, which will in turn populate the underlying model with a rich set of semantic descriptions. These semantic descriptions will be used to render the scene graphically through animated pre-visualizations. A director using the ANSWER methodology will be able to understand and assert certain film making decisions before film production begins.