Story driven animation

An animation system has been developed which generates animations from stories written in natural language. The system consists of three modules: story understanding module, stage directing module and action generating module.

The story understanding module extracts actions that are not explicitly described in the story and makes a scenario. The stage directing module adapts the scenario by determining the actors' positions on the stage and setting the stage. Actors are defined as 3-Dimensional articulated figures. Each component of an actor has its primitive motion method. To achieve complicated actions, primitive motions are combined. Referring to these complicated actions, the action generating module produces animated sequences from the adapted scenario. These three modules are tightly coupled with their knowledge bases. As an example, the story of the “Hare and Tortoise” from Aesop's Fables, written for elementary schoolchildren is used. This example proves that it is possible to produce computer animation directly from the story written in natural language, now in Japanese.