How do shot templates work?

Steven Spielberg, Sam Raimi, and Joss Whedon are called out as examples of shot templates in my patent for AniBot. To clarify, AniBot uses common "tropes" of filmmaking and cinematography and captures these as collections of camera tracking, distance, set layout, etc. All you have to do is study filmmaking and capture these tricks into the database for future use.

For Spielberg, it's FOREGROUND_PANSHOT_SPEILBERG. This is the trick that he uses in a lot of films of having the actor be in the mid ground of the shot and having foreground objects pan through the shot as the character (or the camera) is moving through the shot. It provides depth and interest in the shot.

For Raimi, it's SCARY_CHASE_GROUND_RAIMI. This is the trick he uses in Evil Dead and other movies where the camera is low to the ground, chasing the actor to provide the feeling of a predator low to the ground, hunting.

For Whedon, it's PANNING_CIRCLE_ACTOR_GROUP_WHEDON. This is in reference to the shot in Avengers where the camera pans around the whole team near the climax of the movie and the music swells.

I'm not sure any of them invented these tropes, but now they will be memorialized forever when the AI picks out these tricks to use in its own movies.

So how do they work?

The Shot Sheet that is parsed by AniBot contains useful information for all kinds of things. Some of these include placement of the actor (the focus of the camera), the camera, framing (which is essentially distance from the camera and the what it focuses on), camera tracking, energy levels for various things like actor movement speed, camera pan speed, shot length, mood, tone, all kinds of things. When you capture a combination of these things you are essentially capturing a style.

For instance, Michael Bay and other directors that emulate him use a trick I'll call "Quick Cuts of the Same Action". You will notice this in a lot of movies where a really expensive special effect like an explosion happens. It's meant to convey a sense of kinetic divergence from the rest of the scene. So you may have a car explosion where the main antagonist dies, and this explosion is shown from multiple angles, cut back to back in the course of a few seconds. The fascinating thing about cinema is that your mind automatically makes sense of these patterns eventually. when you first see this trick, you may be confused as to why the same thing is blowing up again and again. Then as the scene resolves, you understand this was a punctuation mark on the plot as presented.

We plan on capturing as many of these "tropes" as possible, and maybe naming them after the people who popularized them.

#filmmaking #animation #ai #patents #cinematography #directing #AniBot