Despite the maturity in solutions for animating expressive virtual characters, innovations
realizing the creative intent of story writers have yet to make the same strides. The key
challenge is to provide an accessible, yet expressive interface for story authoring that
enables the rapid prototyping, iteration, and deployment of narrative concepts. We present
CANVAS, a computerassisted visual authoring tool for synthesizing multi-character
animations from sparsely-specified narrative events. In a process akin to storyboarding …