MotionCanvas: Cinematic Shot Design with Controllable Image-to-Video
  Generation
Authors: name: Jinbo Xing; name: Long Mai; name: Cusuh Ham; name: Jiahui Huang; name: Aniruddha Mahapatra; name: Chi-Wing Fu; name: Tien-Tsin Wong; name: Feng Liu
Published: 2025-02-06 18:41:04

Abstract: This paper presents a method that allows users to design cinematic video
shots in the context of image-to-video generation. Shot design, a critical
aspect of filmmaking, involves meticulously planning both camera movements and
object motions in a scene. However, enabling intuitive shot design in modern
image-to-video generation systems presents two main challenges: first,
effectively capturing user intentions on the motion design, where both camera
movements and scene-space object motions must be specified jointly; and second,
representing motion information that can be effectively utilized by a video
diffusion model to synthesize the image animations. To address these
challenges, we introduce MotionCanvas, a method that integrates user-driven
controls into image-to-video (I2V) generation models, allowing users to control
both object and camera motions in a scene-aware manner. By connecting insights
from classical computer graphics and contemporary video generation techniques,
we demonstrate the ability to achieve 3D-aware motion control in I2V synthesis
without requiring costly 3D-related training data. MotionCanvas enables users
to intuitively depict scene-space motion intentions, and translates them into
spatiotemporal motion-conditioning signals for video diffusion models. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of real-world image
content and shot-design scenarios, highlighting its potential to enhance the
creative workflows in digital content creation and adapt to various image and
video editing applications.