A Support System for Designing Camera Blocking of Battle Scenes in Robot Anime

Japanese robot animation has a long history and many masterpieces have been produced. Robots in the anime have important roles for showing deep storytelling and unique drama. A “battle scene” which visualize a combat against one or more opponents is one of the most important factors of modern robot anime. In this paper, we propose a support system for designing a camera blocking of a battle scene in the robot anime. We have extracted 2531 shots in battle scenes in 10 existing robot animation works and classified them by 17 items such as robot's action, camera movement and shot size. The users can browse classified scenes and their detailed information on camera work and camera blocking stored in our library system, and use desired one as a reference when they draw their original battle scene. Experimental results show that our system is useful for the user without production experience, and facilitates drawing a camera blocking of the battle scene.