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Cinematography affects how the audience perceives a movie. A same story plot can be interpreted differently through the presentation of different camera movements, which show the importance of cinematography in filmmaking. Typically, filmmaking is costly, and beginners and amateurs rarely have the opportunity to play and do an experiment on a film set. In this work, we aim to design and construct a virtual environment for film shooting, allowing a user to play multiple roles in a virtual film set and emulating the process of the filmmaking. Our system provides camera shooting assistants, tools for field directing and real-time editing, aiming to help novices learn cinematographic concepts, track the progress of filmmaking, and create a personalized movie. In order to verify that our system is a user-friendly and effective tool for experiencing filmmaking, we have conducted an experiment to observe the behaviors and obtain feedback from participants with various cinematographic backgrounds.

Creatives in animated and real movie productions have been exploring new modalities to visually design filmic sequences before realizing them in studios, through techniques like hand-drawn storyboards, physical mockups or more recently virtual 3D environments. A central issue in using virtual 3D environments is the complexity of content creation tools for non technical film creatives. To overcome this issue, we present One Man Movie, a VR authoring system which enables the crafting of filmic sequences with no prior knowledge in 3D animation. The system is designed to reflect the traditional creative process in film pre-production through stages like (i) scene layout (ii) animation of characters, (iii) placement and control of cameras and (iv) montage of the filmic sequence, while enabling a fully novel and seamless back-and-forth between all stages of the process thanks to real-time engines. This research tool has been designed and evaluated with students and experts from film schools, and should therefore raise a significant interest among Siggraph participants.