Star-studded comic strips

Movie2Comics is a very clever piece of software that can turn any film into a comic strip. It is the first time this process has been fully automated, although people can tweak the finished results.

The Chinese technology analyses a film, identifies characters via facial recognition and takes screen-grabs of the action.

Once this is complete, it can shuffle and order the screen-grabs to tell a coherent story in comic panels, add speed bubbles and render the finished images in the chosen style.

Meng Wang, a professor at China’s Hefei University of Technology, which is where the technology was developed, says it could be useful for both professionals and hobbyists.

“Professionals can directly use the software to generate comics, or integrate their interaction to achieve more impressive results,” Wang says.

“Hobbyists may… try it to see what will be generated from different movie clips.”

According to Wang, there are two future plans for the software.

“One, improve the performance of each component, such as script-face mapping, and hope we can generate perfect clips without user interaction,” Wang says.

“Two, integrate speech recognition technology to generalise the software, such that we can generate comics without movie scripts.”

Perhaps you can take inspiration from Movie2Comics and come up with your own movie-related software?