ASAP: Auto-generating Storyboard And Previz with Virtual Humans

We present a tool for Auto-generating Storyboard And Previz for screenwriters and filmmakers, called ASAP. Our system allows users to easily simulate their stories in the form of 3D animated/visual scenes with virtual humans in a virtual environment. We only ask users to write their script using Final Draft, an exclusive screenwriting tool, and upload them to our system. The uploaded script is parsed into paragraphs of the action, character, and dialogue. From those paragraphs (i.e., text data), our system uses a combination of deep learning, data-driven, and rule-based approaches to instantly generate virtual human’s physical motions and co-speech gestures, presenting natural behavior/dialogue scenes. Thus, users can observe automatically generated pre-visualized animations (i.e., previz) from the script and can create the storyboard by capturing scenes being played. Our ASAP can minimize time-and-money consuming and labor-intensive work in the early stages of filmmaking, and do it as soon as possible. We believe that our tool and approach have a good potential for wide dissemination in the film industry.