DancingBoard: Streamlining the Creation of Motion Comics to Enhance Narratives

2025-03-12

AI Summary

Amateur creators face significant barriers to dynamic comic production—including high technical thresholds, complex workflows, and dependence on specialized skills—limiting adoption in narrative, educational, and advertising applications. To address this, we propose a lightweight, integrated authoring tool designed for non-professionals, introducing the first “guided motion comic authoring paradigm.” This paradigm integrates structured narrative prompting, a reusable motion template library, and a stepwise visual workflow. Guided by user studies (N=23), expert interviews, and design space analysis, our approach employs survey-driven design, motion pattern abstraction and modeling, and guided UI/UX strategies. Evaluation demonstrates substantially improved authoring efficiency and reduced cognitive load. Audience assessment (N=18) confirms that resulting motion comics achieve narrative effectiveness comparable to those produced with professional tools. This work establishes a novel methodology and practical framework for democratizing dynamic comic creation.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Architectures and workflows that use LLMs for crowd work

Abstract

Motion comics, a digital animation format that enhances comic book narratives, have wide applications in storytelling, education, and advertising. However, their creation poses significant challenges for amateur creators, primarily due to the need for specialized skills and complex workflows. To address these issues, we conducted an exploratory survey (N=58) to understand the challenges associated with creating motion comics, and an expert interview (N=4) to identify a typical workflow for creation. We further analyzed $95$ online motion comics to gain insights into the design space of character and object actions. Based on our findings, we proposed DancingBoard, an integrated authoring tool designed to simplify the creation process. This tool features a user-friendly interface and a guided workflow, providing comprehensive support throughout each step of the creation process. A user study involving 23 creators showed that, compared to professional tools, DancingBoard is easily comprehensible and provides improved guidance and support, requiring less effort from users. Additionally, a separate study with $18$ audience members confirmed the tool's effectiveness in conveying the story to its viewers.

Problem

• Simplify motion comic creation for amateur creators
• Address challenges of specialized skills and complex workflows
• Enhance narrative storytelling through user-friendly authoring tools

Innovation

• Integrated authoring tool simplifies motion comic creation
• User-friendly interface and guided workflow enhance usability
• Comprehensive support reduces effort for amateur creators