Immersive previz: VR authoring for film previsualisation

Creatives in animated and real movie productions have been exploring new modalities to visually design filmic sequences before realizing them in studios, through techniques like hand-drawn storyboards, physical mockups or more recently virtual 3D environments. A central issue in using virtual 3D environments is the complexity of content creation tools for non technical film creatives. To overcome this issue, we present One Man Movie, a VR authoring system which enables the crafting of filmic sequences with no prior knowledge in 3D animation. The system is designed to reflect the traditional creative process in film pre-production through stages like (i) scene layout (ii) animation of characters, (iii) placement and control of cameras and (iv) montage of the filmic sequence, while enabling a fully novel and seamless back-and-forth between all stages of the process thanks to real-time engines. This research tool has been designed and evaluated with students and experts from film schools, and should therefore raise a significant interest among Siggraph participants.