Automatic Movie Generation: Controllable Plot Generation and Video Retrieval

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Final Year Thesis Oral Defense

Title: "Automatic Movie Generation: Controllable Plot Generation and Video 
        Retrieval"

by

CHENG I-Tsun

Abstract:

Movies have taught us morals in life and inspired us in many ways 
possible. However, movies are usually expensive and costly to make. 
Therefore, we attempt to alleviate the complications involved with movie 
production by introducing a novel framework for movie generation. Our 
framework takes in a movie genre as input and generates a movie pertained 
to that genre as well as a plot that the movie attempts to follow. It 
consists of two primary components: 1) Controllable Plot Generation: 
generates the plot pertained to the genre, 2) Video Retrieval: retrieves 
the most relevant video clips from a database given a plot and combine 
them into a movie. For Controllable Plot Generation, we found that by 
using language models and specific attribute classifiers, our model is 
able to generate fluent and consistent plots that are strongly relevant 
with the input genre. For Video Retrieval, we built our custom algorithm 
that matches the plot with the video clips in the dataset by semantic 
similarity and abstractive summarization techniques. By different means of 
evaluation, we found that our movie generation framework is able to 
generate creative movies that is strongly relevant with the input genre 
and the generated plot.


Date            : 3 May 2021 (Monday)

Time            : 10:30-11:10

Zoom Link:
https://hkust.zoom.us/j/92104241476?pwd=RWt5Nkw5cnV1NWNiRy9LSnpBRmNaQT09

Meeting ID      : 921 0424 1476
Passcode        : 205649

Advisor         : Dr. CHEN Qifeng
                  Prof. FUNG Pascale Ngan

2nd Reader      : Prof. SANDER Pedro