1. Automatic Storytelling in Comics

2. Intrinsic Needs of Human Being!
Communication
Storytelling
Today’s world is information-saturated
Computers are becoming a larger and larger part of people’s lives (Intel 2005)
More and more people are documenting their lives with digital images, video, music, and recordings (Imation 2003)
As storage space gets cheaper, and people record more and more and more, they need some way to automate the categorization of all of these digital memories

3. Recall, share and preserve (gaming) experience
Virtual community such as forums, blogs
Video, screenshots, comics or other art formats
Narrative, summary, story
Search “Lineage Story” or “Lineage Comics”…
Around 26,600 files in YouTube and 724,000 items in Google …

4. Example:

5. Example:

6. Narrative
In short, People Like Stories. Or, put more accurately, People Remember Stories
So we provide a summarization tool to aid storytelling of end-users
But why Comics…

7. Comic A storytelling medium Vocabulary of comics Visual language
Panel layout
Border shape
Panel size
Bleed, splash page
Speech balloon and sound effects
Motion lines
Visual language
Draw attention to important events
Reference: (McCloud, Scott)

8. Comic Generation Tools
Automation support
The computer is charged with a greater role in the creation of the comic
Authoring support
Tools offer the most agency in creating panels and layouts of any size and shape
Reference:

9. Comic Chat (1996) conversations as sequences of comic panels.
Comic Chat visually represents
conversations as sequences of
comic panels.
Automation support:
Changing posture and facial expression of users’ avatars in chat room
Placing word balloons in natural reading order
Zooming “camera” to frame the people talking
Parsing text into panels procedurally.
Panels are all in the same size
Reference:

10. Microsoft Chat 2.5 Authoring support: Chat room: Comic mode
Emotion Wheel allows users to choose the facial expression and body language
Massage

11. Microsoft Chat Character Editor
Character Icon
Character Contents
New Pose

12. Example:

13. Video Manga (1999-2003) It provides a summary of video clips
that allows users to quickly browse a long
video in comic book format.
Manga is named after a Japanese word for "comic book"
A video is represented with different-sized keyframes that packed in a comic book format
Video Manga allows users to quickly browse a long video
The visual summaries support printing function
Reference:

14. Automation support: Authoring support:
A video is segmented based on the color features of each frame
The segments are clustered according to their similarities
We have introduced an importance score to rank the segments
A segment is considered to be important if it is long and rare
The keyframes are extracted from highly ranked segments
The keyframes are sized according to their scores
The frame-packing algorithm puts the keyframes in a comic book format
Authoring support:
Handling captions to its frames manually typed in by users

15. Video Manga : Summary of staff meeting

16. Generating Comics From 3D Interactive Computer Graphics (2006)
Automation support:
Recognizing scenes
Converting to visual depiction
Comic layout
Image processing
Reference:

17. Automation support Recognizing scenes Converting to visual depiction
Time and space
Separating scenes when
The interaction level is low
The location changes
Converting to visual depiction
Transforming each scene into a sequence of images depicting the main event
Using idioms to depict interactions
Change of scene
Shooting
conversation

18. Comic layout Image processing
B (Big): peak interaction images and change-of-scene
S (small): action-to-action pair or FP viewpoint shots
F (fixed): images with speech balloon
N (neutral): all others
Image processing
Mean shift
Laplacian
K-means

19. Example:

20. Comic Life (2005) Application for creating comics: Authoring support:
loading images into comic panels
Authoring support:
Simple and Easy-to-use interface
Drag in your pictures, captions, sound effects (‘ka-blam!') and speech balloons and it’s done!
Layout templates
Filters like hand-drawn, painted and night vision
More freedom to create comic but still some restrictions
Reference:

21. Comic Life 1.3

22. Example:

23. Manga Studio Authoring support: Application for creating comics:
drawing, laying out comic and
styling comics
Authoring support:
High versatility and flexibility to create comics
A large collection of special effects
Sketch, ink, and color artworks without the need for any other graphics applications
Interface similar to Photoshop
Reference:

24. Our Proposal Automation support Authoring support User interface
Frame selection
Layout computing
Authoring support
Comic layout
Graphic Effects
Internet support
User interface

25. Comic Gene (2009) Automation support: Authoring support:
It automatically summarize players’
interactions (logs and screenshots)
in virtual world into comics.
Automation support:
Recording log and shots (Addon)
Frame selection
Comic layout computing
Rendering comics
Authoring support:
Editing log files and screenshots
Comic layout
Option setting
Changing size and position of the shots
Reference:

26. Prototype
…How to improve!

27. 1. Automation Support
Automatically summarize logs and frames into comics
Log: events
Frame: video, photos, screenshots and so on
Definition of important events
Frequency, weight
Significance score

28. Frame selection Layout computing
How many images does a comic strip need?
Is the criterion of significance score enough?
Layout computing
Algorithm
Detection

29. 2. Authoring Support Page properties Important event/frames
How many images in a comic/page/row/… ?
Important event/frames
Comic layout
Panel layout
Border shape, bleed
Panel size
Speech balloon
Sound effects

30. Graphic effects Internet support Templates Cartoon-like design
Cartoon-like filter
Motion line
Internet support
Uploading comics to individual album or blog

31. 5. User Interface Design User-friendly Features Navigation bar
Easy-to-use
Click, wheel
Drag-n-drop

32. UI Example: Videolyzer
Navigation bar

33. UI Example: Comic Life
Drag-n-drop

34. UI Proposal: Comic Gene
Drag-n-drop

35. Thank you