Generating Animations from Screenplays
Yeyao Zhang, Eleftheria Tsipidi, Sasha Schriber, Mubbasir Kapadia, Markus H. Groß, Ashutosh Modi · 2019
Automatically generating animation from natural language text finds application in a number of areas e.g.movie script writing, instructional videos, and public safety.However, translating natural language text into animation is a challenging task.Existing text-toanimation systems can handle only very simple sentences, which limits their applications.In this paper, we develop a text-to-animation system which is capable of handling complex sentences.We achieve this by introducing a text simplification step into the process.Building on an existing animation generation system for screenwriting, we create a robust NLP pipeline to extract information from screenplays and map them to the system's knowledge base.We develop a set of linguistic transformation rules that simplify complex sentences.Information extracted from the simplified sentences is used to generate a rough storyboard and video depicting the text.Our sentence simplification module outperforms existing systems in terms of BLEU and SARI metrics.We further evaluated our system via a user study: 68 % participants believe that our system generates reasonable animation from input screenplays.