Graphic Narrative with Interactive Stylization Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive system for converting images into storyboards with customizable stylizations, combining manual design tools and automatic procedural methods for creative and efficient graphic narrative generation.

Contribution

It presents a novel interactive stylization design tool and a procedural approach for automatic filter sequence assembly, enabling real-time storyboard creation on mobile devices.

Findings

Interactive stylization tool for user-designed filters

Procedural method for automatic filter sequence generation

Examples of appealing storyboards created with both methods

Abstract

We present a system to convert any set of images (e.g., a video clip or a photo album) into a storyboard. We aim to create multiple pleasing graphic representations of the content at interactive rates, so the user can explore and find the storyboard (images, layout, and stylization) that best suits their needs and taste. The main challenges of this work are: selecting the content images, placing them into panels, and applying a stylization. For the latter, we propose an interactive design tool to create new stylizations using a wide range of filter blocks. This approach unleashes the creativity by allowing the user to tune, modify, and intuitively design new sequences of filters. In parallel to this manual design, we propose a novel procedural approach that automatically assembles sequences of filters for innovative results. We aim to keep the algorithm complexity as low as possible such that it can run interactively on a mobile device. Our results include examples of styles designed using both our interactive and procedural tools, as well as their final composition into interesting and appealing storyboards.