Sportoonizer: Augmenting Sports Highlights' Narration and Visual Impact via Automatic Manga B-Roll Generation

TL;DR

Sportoonizer is an AI-powered system that automatically generates manga-style animations and seamlessly integrates them into sports highlight videos, enhancing visual appeal and viewer engagement.

Contribution

It introduces an automated pipeline for creating and inserting manga-style content into sports videos, reducing manual effort and enriching storytelling.

Findings

Manga B-rolls increase viewer engagement.

Enhanced visual interest observed with manga integration.

Improved emotional connection to athletes' stories.

Abstract

Sports highlights are becoming increasingly popular on video-sharing platforms. Yet, crafting sport highlight videos is challenging, which requires producing engaging narratives from different angles, and conforming to different platform affordances with constantly changing audiences. Many content creators therefore create derivative work of the original sports video through manga styles to enhance its expressiveness. But manually creating and inserting tailored manga-style content can still be time-consuming. We introduce Sportoonizer, a system embedding the pipeline for automatic generation of manga-style animations for highlights in sports videos and insertion into original videos. It seamlessly merges dynamic manga sequences with live-action footage, enriching the visual tapestry and deepening narrative scope. By leveraging genAIs, Sportoonizer crafts compelling storylines encapsulating the intensity of sports moments and athletes' personal journeys. Our evaluation study demonstrates that integrating manga B-rolls significantly enhances viewer engagement, visual interest, and emotional connection towards athletes' stories in the viewing experience.