ScriptViz: A Visualization Tool to Aid Scriptwriting based on a Large Movie Database

TL;DR

ScriptViz is developed to provide external visualization based on a large movie database for the screenwriting process, and retrieves reference visuals on the fly based on scripts’ text and dialogue from a large movie database.

Abstract

Scriptwriters usually rely on their mental visualization to create a vivid story by using their imagination to see, feel, and experience the scenes they are writing. Besides mental visualization, they often refer to existing images or scenes in movies and analyze the visual elements to create a certain mood or atmosphere. In this paper, we develop ScriptViz to provide external visualization based on a large movie database for the screenwriting process. It retrieves reference visuals on the fly based on scripts' text and dialogue from a large movie database. The tool provides two types of control on visual elements that enable writers to 1) see exactly what they want with fixed visual elements and 2) see variances in uncertain elements. User evaluation among 15 scriptwriters shows that ScriptViz is able to present scriptwriters with consistent yet diverse visual possibilities, aligning closely with their scripts and helping their creation.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: The pipeline of ScriptViz. It first preprocesses the database and retrieves scenes according to user's input. It is based on two types of control on visual attributes that enable writers to 1) see exactly what they want with fixed visual elements and 2) see variances in uncertain elements. It then retrieves images for each script’s dialogue sequences.
• Figure 2: Preprocess database. Setting: we compute the CLIP radford2021learning visual-text similarity between setting tags and visual frames to acquire recognizability score of setting tags for each frame. Cast: we detect the front face to acquire a recognizability score for each character in each frame.
• Figure 3: ScriptViz interface that consists of four components. Users type in scripts (A) in AMPAS standard, add attributes control (B) component in SQL format, and click the submit button (C). ScriptViz provides visualized outputs (D) from different movie scenes, where each containing one established shot overview and images for each line of dialogue in the script.
• Figure 4: A scriptwriter writes a script containing three characters and nine lines. ScriptViz returns one overview of the established shot and nine images showing three characters.
• Figure 5: A screenwriter types in a script and selects their story's fixed and variable attributes. ScriptViz retrieves sequences for the input script. The screenwriter iterates on the script based on the proposed sequences. The visualization helps to enrich the details of the existing dialogue and write the unfinished dialogue.