Automatic cinematography and multilingual NLG for generating video documentaries

Automatically constructing a complete documentary or educational film from scattered pieces of images and knowledge is a significant challenge. Even when this information is provided in an annotated format, the problems of ordering, structuring and animating sequences of images, and producing natural language descriptions that correspond to those images within multiple constraints, are each individually difficult tasks. This paper describes an approach for tackling these problems through a combination of rhetorical structures with narrative and film theory to produce movie-like visual animations from still images along with natural language generation techniques needed to produce text descriptions of what is being seen in the animations. The use of rhetorical structures from NLG is used to integrate separate components for video creation and script generation. We further describe an implementation, named Glamour, that produces actual, short video documentaries, focusing on a cultural heritage domain, and that have been evaluated by professional filmmakers. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.