# Generating Animations from Screenplays

## TL;DR

This paper presents a novel text-to-animation system capable of handling complex sentences by integrating a sentence simplification step, resulting in more accurate and reasonable animations from screenplays, validated through quantitative metrics and user studies.

## Contribution

Introduces a robust NLP pipeline with sentence simplification for generating animations from complex screenplay texts, improving over existing systems.

## Key findings

- Sentence simplification outperforms existing systems in BLEU and SARI metrics.
- 68% of users find the generated animations reasonable.
- System handles complex sentences better than prior approaches.

## Abstract

Automatically generating animation from natural language text finds application in a number of areas e.g. movie script writing, instructional videos, and public safety. However, translating natural language text into animation is a challenging task. Existing text-to-animation systems can handle only very simple sentences, which limits their applications. In this paper, we develop a text-to-animation system which is capable of handling complex sentences. We achieve this by introducing a text simplification step into the process. Building on an existing animation generation system for screenwriting, we create a robust NLP pipeline to extract information from screenplays and map them to the system's knowledge base. We develop a set of linguistic transformation rules that simplify complex sentences. Information extracted from the simplified sentences is used to generate a rough storyboard and video depicting the text. Our sentence simplification module outperforms existing systems in terms of BLEU and SARI metrics.We further evaluated our system via a user study: 68 % participants believe that our system generates reasonable animation from input screenplays.