Organizations: Cornell University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · University of California, Los Angeles · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Complex camera motion is central to visual storytelling, yet translating cinematographic intent into controllable, executable camera trajectories remains challenging. We introduce FilmFlow, an agentic framework that converts natural-language instructions or reference videos into explicit camera trajectories for dynamic 3D environments. To generate these trajectories, a Director agent constructs executable camera plans by composing high-level motions from concurrent atomic operations that jointly control translation, rotation, and framing. The Director is supported by three specialized agents: an Interpreter that extracts scene-grounded cinematographic intent, a Scout that selects initial viewpoints, and a Critic that evaluates rendered results and provides visual feedback for iterative plan refinement. We also introduce CinemaBench, comprising 150 Blender scenes from self-created and licensed sources, with five camera instructions per scene for 750 text-directed tasks and 60 reference videos associated with a subset of scenes. CinemaBench supports evaluation of both text-directed camera generation and video reference-directed camera generation. Across a diverse set of evaluated baselines, FilmFlow achieves the strongest benchmark performance and the highest user preference, demonstrating effective spatial reasoning, temporal coordination, and visual composition for executable 3D cinematography.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: FilmFlow at a glance. Cooperating agents use visual feedback to iteratively refine executable camera plans, enabling text-directed camera generation and reference-video directed camera generation in static or dynamic 3D scenes.
Figure 2: System design of FilmFlow. The Interpreter grounds the instruction in the 3D scene; the Scout searches for an opening viewpoint; the Director composes concurrent atomic operations into a camera plan, optionally conditioned on a retrieved demonstration (ICL). A shared Critic combines hard checks, visual assessment, and temporal quality to guide both the Scout and Director.
Function
Operations
Position
Dolly In, Dolly Out, Truck, Pedestal Up, Pedestal Down, Orbit, Path Follow, Position Follow, Height Follow, Distance Follow
Orientation
Pan, Tilt, Aim Follow, Screen Position Lock, Roll, Horizon Lock
Framing
Zoom, Frame Subject
Focus
Focus Pull, Focus Follow
Perturbation
Shake / Handheld
Hold
Static Shot
Table 1: The 22 atomic camera operations supported by FilmFlow.
T2V
V2V
Method
Align. ↑
Quality ↑
Motion ↑
Probe ↑
Method
Align. ↑
Quality ↑
Motion ↑
Probe ↑
LAMP
-1.747
41.54
0.209
0.564
Zero-shot VLM
-1.417
35.86
0.041
0.502
GenDoP
-1.768
39.63
0.257
0.597
LingBot-Map
-1.472
35.55
0.278
0.521
CinemaTraj
-1.788
44.65
-0.068
0.618
VGGT- Ω
-1.491
34.88
0.176
0.533
FilmFlow
-1.461
47.60
0.555
0.829
FilmFlow
-1.224
41.77
0.289
0.750
Table 2: Quantitative comparison on CinemaBench. Results are averaged over all 500 T2V and 40 V2V tasks. Align and Motion report VideoReward text alignment and motion quality, respectively; Quality reports the DOVER composite score (0–100). Higher is better for all metrics. Bold marks the best score in each column.
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison for text-directed camera generation. The instruction and target 3D scene are shown on the left; rows show each method’s output at the indicated timestamps. While the baselines mostly show walls or obstructed views, FilmFlow reveals the pedestrians, turns toward the boulevard, and brings the target green sedan into view.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison for video reference-directed camera generation. Reference frames and the target 3D scene are shown on the left; rows on the right show each method’s output at the indicated timestamps. FilmFlow adjusts the viewpoint as the subject moves and keeps the subject visible across the sampled frames. LingBot-Map misses the subject in the opening frames, VGGT- Ω crops the subject in later frames, and the zero-shot VLM loses the subject in the final frame. The comparison concerns camera behavior rather than scene appearance.
T2V
V2V
Variant
Align. ↑
Quality ↑
Motion ↑
Probe ↑
Align. ↑
Quality ↑
Motion ↑
Probe ↑
w/o Scout
-1.542
46.11
0.387
0.770
-1.344
40.77
0.243
0.673
Sequential-only Operations
-1.547
45.06
0.536
0.775
-1.314
40.78
0.278
0.717
w/o Critic
-1.499
45.25
0.430
0.770
-1.288
37.21
0.191
0.716
w/o ICL
-1.474
46.12
0.447
0.724
-1.296
39.04
0.172
0.766
Full FilmFlow
-1.461
47.60
0.555
0.829
-1.224
41.77
0.289
0.750
Table 3: Ablation study on CinemaBench. Full FilmFlow achieves the highest alignment, video quality, and motion quality scores in both tasks, and the highest T2V Probe score. Probe is the mean match probability from the CameraBench-based evaluator. Higher is better; bold marks the best score in each column.
Figure 5: Qualitative ablation for text-directed camera generation. FilmFlow shows close views of the red, green, and dark-clothed characters before returning to the red character. Without Scout, the opening remains a distant group view; without Critic or ICL, foreground characters obstruct the intended subject in intermediate frames. The instruction and target scene are shown on the left; columns show frames at the indicated timestamps.
Figure 6: Qualitative ablation for video reference-directed camera generation. FilmFlow maintains more consistent target framing across the sampled frames, while the ablated variants show less consistent subject scale, obstructed views, or loss of the target. Reference frames and the target 3D scene are shown on the left; columns show outputs at the indicated timestamps.
T2V
V2V
Method
Pass Rate ↑
Top-1 Rate ↑
Method
Pass Rate ↑
Top-1 Rate ↑
LAMP
42.1%
12.1%
Zero-shot VLM
63.0%
2.3%
GenDoP
46.2%
5.7%
LingBot-Map
77.3%
17.4%
CinemaTraj
63.8%
21.2%
VGGT- Ω
73.3%
17.1%
FilmFlow
84.3%
61.0%
FilmFlow
82.1%
63.2%
Table 4: User study on CinemaBench. FilmFlow has the highest pass rate in both tasks and is ranked first in 61.0% of T2V judgments and 63.2% of V2V judgments. Pass Rate is the proportion of completed judgments marked as pass; Top-1 Rate is the proportion of rankings in which a method is placed first. Higher is better; bold marks the best result within each task and metric.
T2V
V2V
Method
Align. ↑
Quality ↑
Motion ↑
Method
Align. ↑
Quality ↑
Motion ↑
LAMP
2.6
2.9
2.7
Zero-shot VLM
2.5
2.8
2.7
GenDoP
2.8
3.0
2.9
LingBot-Map
3.2
3.5
3.3
CinemaTraj
3.5
3.7
3.6
VGGT- Ω
3.4
3.6
3.5
FilmFlow
4.2
4.4
4.3
FilmFlow
4.0
4.3
4.0
Table 5: Human ratings on CinemaBench. FilmFlow receives the highest mean ratings for alignment, visual quality, and motion smoothness in both tasks. Align., Quality, and Motion denote the corresponding ratings on a five-point scale. For V2V, alignment measures how well the camera behavior matches the reference, rather than similarity in scene appearance. Higher is better; bold marks the best result within each task and criterion.
Table 6: Atomic operations, their effects, and operation-specific parameters. Common parameters are given above.
Dev
Test
Total
Scenes (dynamic / static)
27 / 23
46 / 54
73 / 77
T2V tasks (easy / medium / hard)
50 / 100 / 100
100 / 200 / 200
150 / 300 / 300
V2V tasks
20
40
60
Human-written instructions
20
30
50
Appendix
Table 7: CinemaBench statistics.
Figure 7: Additional qualitative comparison for text-directed camera generation. The instruction requests a bullet-time orbit that starts from a rear three-quarter view, sweeps to the front of a crouching, backward-leaning figure, and settles into a locked-off hold. The instruction and target 3D scene are shown on the left; rows show each method’s output at the indicated timestamps. LAMP and GenDoP drift away from the figure toward the wall or empty frames, and CinemaTraj approaches the figure but leaves it off-center under an oblique view. FilmFlow keeps the figure centered as the rooftop slides behind it and ends on a stable frontal view of the backbend.
Figure 8: Additional qualitative comparison for video reference-directed camera generation. The reference clip moves from a view of the group toward a single subject and ends on a tight close-up. Reference frames and the target 3D scene are shown on the left; rows show each method’s output at the indicated timestamps. LingBot-Map stays close to a static wide view, VGGT- Ω crops the subject in intermediate frames, and the zero-shot VLM loses the subject in the final frame. FilmFlow reproduces the progression from group view to single subject and ends on a close-up that matches the reference framing. The comparison concerns camera behavior rather than scene appearance.
Figure 9: An example of Scout refinement. The Director-specified opening (w/o Scout) and the Scout-selected opening are shown for the same instruction, with the Scout’s selection rationale and the corresponding camera states. Elevation denotes the camera’s pitch angle; the Scout-selected camera is placed higher and pitched downward toward the subject.
Figure 10: An example of Director refinement under a fixed opening. Frame sequences and operation timelines before and after revision show how Critic feedback guides changes to operation parameters and temporal composition.
Figure 11: An example of in-context conditioning across different scenes. The retrieved demonstration is displayed separately from the current task. Results with and without ICL use the same current instruction and target scene.
Figure 12: Grey model render as a video-generation condition (group close-ups). The top row shows the grey model render of a FilmFlow trajectory that gives successive close-ups to figures in a group. Each subsequent row is generated from the same render with a different text prompt. Camera motion, framing, and subject placement follow the render, while appearance follows the prompt.
Figure 13: Grey model render as a video-generation condition (leading shot). The top row shows the grey model render of a FilmFlow trajectory that leads two walking subjects while other characters enter from the right. The four generated videos keep the framing of the pair and the timing of the entering characters across different styles.
Automatically generating cinematically expressive camera trajectories through 3D scenes from natural language descriptions is a challenging task of high practical value, with applications ranging from real-estate advertising to virtual tour creation. Existing methods either lack true 3D spatial awareness by relying on 2D image priors, or treat trajectory generation as a geometric path planning problem divorced from cinematographic semantics. We present CinemaTraj, a framework that reframes camera trajectory planning as a language-grounded spatial reasoning problem. Given a set of RGB-D images and a user prompt, CinemaTraj equips an LLM agent with a structured 3D scene graph: the agent decomposes the prompt into a sequence of atomic cinematographic movements (dolly, orbit, crane, pan, tilt, zoom, arc). Each movement is instantiated via a novel parametric trajectory representation that is both cinematographically expressive and optimizable for collision avoidance. The scene graph acts as a structured spatial prior, grounding the agent's reasoning in accurate geometric and semantic knowledge of the environment. CinemaTraj further generates synchronized voiceover and subtitles aligned with camera motion, producing narrated cinematic video outputs. We evaluate CinemaTraj on real-world ScanNet++ environments, and show that it produces prompt-faithful, collision-free trajectories with high cinematographic quality, outperforming existing approaches on prompt alignment, trajectory quality, and safety metrics.
Qianru Li, Xuyang Chen, Erkin Türköz +5
Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany · Huawei Dresden Research Center Munich, Germany
Video generation has achieved remarkable progress in visual fidelity and controllability, enabling conditioning on text, layout, or motion. Among these, motion control - specifying object dynamics and camera trajectories - is essential for composing complex, cinematic scenes, yet existing interfaces remain limited. We introduce LAMP that leverages large language models (LLMs) as motion planners to translate natural language descriptions into explicit 3D trajectories for dynamic objects and (relatively defined) cameras. LAMP defines a motion domain-specific language (DSL), inspired by cinematography conventions. By harnessing program synthesis capabilities of LLMs, LAMP generates structured motion programs from natural language, which are deterministically mapped to 3D trajectories. We construct a large-scale procedural dataset pairing natural text descriptions with corresponding motion programs and 3D trajectories. Experiments demonstrate LAMP's improved performance in motion controllability and alignment with user intent compared to state-of-the-art alternatives establishing the first framework for generating both object and camera motions directly from natural language specifications. Code, models and data are available on our project page.
Muhammed Burak Kizil, Enes Sanli, Niloy J. Mitra +3
Koç University · University College London · Adobe Research +1
We propose Camera Artist, a multi-agent framework that models a real-world filmmaking workflow to generate narrative videos with explicit cinematic language. While recent multi-agent systems have made substantial progress in automating filmmaking workflows from scripts to videos, they often lack explicit mechanisms to structure narrative progression across adjacent shots and deliberate use of cinematic language, resulting in fragmented storytelling and limited filmic quality. To address this, Camera Artist builds upon established agentic pipelines and introduces a dedicated Cinematography Shot Agent, which integrates recursive storyboard generation to strengthen shot-to-shot narrative continuity and cinematic language injection to produce more expressive, film-oriented shot designs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines in narrative consistency, dynamic expressiveness, and perceived film quality.
Haobo Hu, Qi Mao, Yuanhang Li +1
School of Information and Communication Engineering, Communication University of China, Beijing, China · State Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China