Director’s Cut - Analysis of VR Film Cuts for Interactive Storytelling

Abstract

The usage of film cuts, or transitions, is a powerful technique in interactive storytelling to express the film story by leading the viewers attention. To explore how existing transition techniques are currently being used by professional 360 • filmmakers, this paper investigates the impact of transitions and additional graphical elements from a storytelling perspective. We base this on the recently published Director's Cut dataset [1] which contains professional 360 • films with the directors' intending viewing direction (i.e., director's cut) and test subjects' scan-paths. Our objective is to examine widely used transition techniques in professional 360 • film, and with our finding guide filmmakers in the storytelling and editing process. To the authors knowledge, this is the first study to analyze professionally prepared VR film cuts concerning the distance of viewers' scan-paths and director's cut. We observed that the intended viewing direction is required for the viewer to understand the story best and not miss the director's plot points. The transition is a point where the viewers are presented with a new scene and are required to orientate themselves within it. Thus if there is a considerable distance mismatch between the intended and actual viewing, the viewer is not in the best position to understand the scene properly. Our results show that the use of simple graphics can serve as a reference for viewers as the transition happens and they are presented with a new immersive environment.

The Application of VR Technology in Film Production

“…Camera language is gradually enriched with the development of films, but in VR films, the importance of camera language is no longer obvious. Film is to tell a story through the screen, and the lens language is an important tool to assist the story telling [7]. In the creation of VR films, camera language has been reduced to the period of single camera language in the late 19th century and early 20th century.…”

Do Users Behave Similarly in VR? Investigation of the User Influence on the System Design

“…A HMD-based Director's Cut dataset has been proposed in Knorr et al [24] to evaluate the users' attention in storyteller ODV. An interactive storytelling perspective was then presented in [15,16]. More recently, Nasrabadi et al [31] investigated the impact of camera motion on HMD navigation trajectories using the clique-based clustering presented in [44].…”

Viewer’s Role and Viewer Interaction in Cinematic Virtual Reality

“…Under Mise-en-scene, people have been trying to maintain narrative control and deliver dramatic experiences by changing the user's viewpoint in the scene (e.g., camera placement), the placement of action, and the story elements [7][8][9]. Other work comes from a cinematographic perspective and discusses how the spatial-temporal density of a story, the framing grammar, and editing techniques apply to CVR [3,[10][11][12]. Finally, some researchers have explored methods to direct the viewer's attention within the immersive environment to important story elements [2,4,13,14].…”