  Amateurs working on mini-films and short-form videos usually spend lots of
time and effort on the multi-round complicated process of setting and adjusting
scenes, plots, and cameras to deliver satisfying video shots. We present
Virtual Dynamic Storyboard (VDS) to allow users storyboarding shots in virtual
environments, where the filming staff can easily test the settings of shots
before the actual filming. VDS runs on a "propose-simulate-discriminate" mode:
Given a formatted story script and a camera script as input, it generates
several character animation and camera movement proposals following predefined
story and cinematic rules to allow an off-the-shelf simulation engine to render
videos. To pick up the top-quality dynamic storyboard from the candidates, we
equip it with a shot ranking discriminator based on shot quality criteria
learned from professional manual-created data. VDS is comprehensively validated
via extensive experiments and user studies, demonstrating its efficiency,
effectiveness, and great potential in assisting amateur video production.
