Longboard: A Sketch Based Intelligent Storyboarding Tool for Creating Machinima

Real-time 3D game environments provide a compelling medium for cinematic storytelling. Professional filmmakers have started using them for pre-visualization. They provide a low-cost learning environment to students. Longboard is an intelligent storyboarding tool that provides content authors access to 3D graphical environments through an intuitive sketch based interface. Users can author scripts and visualize them on a game engine. Longboard provides a pen-based interface for authoring scenarios and sketching 2D storyboard frames that are rendered in 3D on a game engine. A hierarchical causal link planner — Darshak — encodes cinematic shots and idioms as plan operators and automatically completes unspecified shots from the user generated scenario and executes script and story actions. A real-time geometric constraint solver written on the Unreal game engine is used for rendering the shots. Longboard is developed as a platform for integrating research in interactive storytelling, intelligent cinematography, and intelligent user interfaces for creative professionals. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of Longboard.