Making Movies from Make-Believe Games

Abstract

Pretend play is a storytelling technique, naturally used from very young ages, which relies on object substitution to represent the characters of the imagined story. We propose "Make-believe", a system for making movies from pretend play by using 3D printed figurines as props. We capture the rigid motions of the figurines and the gestures and facial expressions of the storyteller using Kinect cameras and IMU sensors and transfer them to the virtual story-world. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate our system with an improvised story involving a prince and a witch, which was successfully recorded and transferred into 3D animation.