Automated cinematic reasoning about camera behavior

Automated control of a virtual camera is useful for both linear animation and interactive virtual environments. It has been partially addressed in the past by numeric constraint optimization and by idiom-based approaches. We have constructed a knowledge-based system that allows users to experiment with various cinematic genres and view the results in the form of animated 3D movies. We have followed a knowledge acquisition process converting domain expert principles into declarative rules, and our system uses non-monotonic reasoning in order to support absolute rules, default rules, and arbitrary user choices. We evaluated the tool by generating various movies and showing some of the results to a group of expert viewers.