Cine AI: Emulating Director Styles in Game Cutscenes

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis

Date

2021-06-14

Department

Major/Subject

Game Design and Production

Mcode

SCI3046

Degree programme

Master’s Programme in Computer, Communication and Information Sciences

Language

en

Pages

42 + 6

Series

Abstract

We propose Cine-AI, a novel open-source toolset that allows mimicking famous movie directors’ cinematography styles in in-game cutscenes. As the quality and production costs of such scenes increase, game companies and developers need new tools for automating the process. Such methods and tools have been proposed, but most of them lack empirical data of real directors, resulting in a lack of unique filmography characteristics. Cine-AI proposes a set of tools that use a director style description extracted from an annotated dataset of video clips by the director. This data is processed by Cine-AI, resulting in procedurally generated camera framing, movement and transitions. The final composition is presented to the users in design-time by the means of a storyboard, allowing full customization and fine tuning. We evaluate the proposed system through two experiments. First, we quantitatively confirm that Cine-AI can produce recognizable director styles, at least in the case of the two directors used in our study. Our participants were able to distinguish the generated Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie styles with an accuracy of 79%. Second, we conducted a usability study with 12 game developers, resulting in a moderately high System Usability Scale score and qualitative comments for informing future work. For instance, the users appreciated Cine-AI’s ease of use and suggested more documentation such as tooltips or interface wizards.

Description

Supervisor

Hämäläinen, Perttu

Thesis advisor

Guckelsberg, Christian

Keywords

procedural, camera control, cinematics, director styles, in-game cutscene, procedural camera

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