Abstract
This paper describes a software system designed to automate the production of digital movies with various visual effects like three-dimension animation, real image, and their composition. The production system can understand user's input screenplay through a parser then automatically interprets it into a relevant motion picture under the direction of a virtual director in place of a human one. The virtual director achieves user's intentions through knowledge-based approach by setting a scene, determining the corresponding shot types and shot sequence, and planning virtual camerawork dependent on the cinematic expertise stored in a domain knowledge base. We model the filmmaking knowledge and rule-based reasoning strategies in expert system language CLIPS. Video data is encoded in XML and tracked by the MPEG-7 standard.
