Planning animation cinematography and shot structure to communicate theme and mood

Standard techniques, such as soundtrack recording, storyboarding and key-framing, are used to create animation adaptations of narratives. Many aspects of the narrative, such as moods, themes, character motivations and plot, must he captured in the audio-visual medium. Our work focusses on achieving the communication of moods and themes solely through the application of well-known cinematography techniques. We present a planning system that transforms a description of animator intentions and character actions into a series of camera shots which portray these intentions. The planner accomplishes this portrayal by utilizing lighting, framing, camera motion, colour choice and shot pacing. The final output is an animation that is intended to produce a viewer impression to support the animator's description of the mood and theme of the narrative.