A Customizable Generator for Comic-Style Visual Narrative
This work addresses the need for customizable visual narrative authoring tools, potentially useful for comic creators and researchers in computational narrative understanding, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories without major breakthroughs.
The authors tackled the problem of generating comic-style visual narratives by developing a theory-inspired generator that incorporates comic-authoring idioms, resulting in a system that creates comics through sequential decision-making across layers like panel composition and transitions, with example outputs demonstrating variety.
We present a theory-inspired visual narrative generator that incorporates comic-authoring idioms, which transfers the conceptual principles of comics into system layers that integrate the theories to create comic content. The generator creates comics through sequential decision-making across layers from panel composition, object positions, panel transitions, and narrative elements. Each layer's decisions are based on narrative goals and follow the respective layer idioms of the medium. Cohn's narrative grammar provides the overall story arc. Photographic compositions inspired by the rule of thirds is used to provide panel compositions. McCloud's proposed panel transitions based on focus shifts between scene, character, and temporal changes are encoded in the transition layer. Finally, common overlay symbols (such as the exclamation) are added based on analyzing action verbs using an action-verb ontology. We demonstrate the variety of generated comics through various settings with example outputs. The generator and associated modules could be a useful system for visual narrative authoring and for further research into computational models of visual narrative understanding.