Capturing Triadic Conversations — A Visual Director System for Dynamic Interactive Narratives

Film cinematography has been developed and applied for more than a century to involve and engage the viewer in visual storytelling. Interactive storytelling games can benefit from these cinematic conventions to enhance visual experience. However, even conversation scenes in games are highly dynamic, and pre-authoring camera parameters using cinematography principles is often insufficient. This paper proposes an automatic Visual Director System focused on dynamic conversation scenes involving three characters and reports on work in progress on a prototype applied to the recreation of a movie scene. Based on principles of cinematography and the study of film scenes, cinematic conventions for triadic conversations are encoded modularly as an artificial intelligence game component that selects suitable shots for dynamic scenes.