Storyboard

BAM! ZAP! KAPOW! AND NOW YOUR VIDEO’S A COMIC BOOK! Free | research.google.com

The latest ‘appsperiment’ from Google’s research team involves a trio of AI-driven photography and videography tools, the most interesting of which is dubbed Storyboard. Using a combination of object and person recognition, as well as segmentation and stylisation algorithms, this app analyses any video you feed it and spits out a multi-panel storyboard, akin to a classic comic book page. If you’re not happy with the result, you can simply swipe down in order to refresh it and (except for the initial analysis) this shuffling process is near-instantaneous. Each new storyboard will have a fresh layout of panels, and each image will be taken from a different section and crop of your video. The art-style also changes with each refresh, cycling through a variety of sketch, brush and cut-out filters. While the ever-learning recognition algorithm occasionally misses the mark, it’s generally pretty accurate and tends to include the important bits. The biggest detractor at the moment is the application of the various filters as they will often distort the scene to the point of abstraction, although this can be avoided by using distinct and clear source material.