Examination of the underlying principles of creativity reveal theoretical aspects that have not been well explored in creativity facilitation software. Most significantly of these, there has been little investigation into exploiting the distinctions between early- and late-stage creative processes and the attendant differences in cognitive processing active at those times, nor into employing the structural scaffolding embedded within creative works and the manner in which these can be extracted and harnessed to define levels of abstraction through which the material can be viewed and manipulated. The Wheelsong project was conceived to exploit these principles, in the service of devising more creatively facilitative music composition tools, by focusing on these earlier, exploratory stages of the creative process, and by privileging structure over minutiae, in alignment with the mode of cognition (and corresponding user needs) that dominate the exploratory phase. Explorations conducted with Wheelsong demonstrate that the platform embraces broad stylistic and cultural ranges of output. Experiments comparing the creative merits of early-stage, fragmentary outputs produced by Wheelsong against those produced by traditional representation schemes show a substantial improvement in both subjective quality and diversity indicators adhering to the structurally produced candidates, as measured by human judges.

Examination of the underlying principles of creativity reveal theoretical aspects that have not been well explored in creativity facilitation software. Most significantly of these, there has been little investigation into exploiting the distinctions between early- and late-stage creative processes and the attendant differences in cognitive processing active at those times, nor into employing the structural scaffolding embedded within creative works and the manner in which these can be extracted and harnessed to define levels of abstraction through which the material can be viewed and manipulated. The Wheelsong project was conceived to exploit these principles, in the service of devising more creatively facilitative music composition tools, by focusing on these earlier, exploratory stages of the creative process, and by privileging structure over minutiae, in alignment with the mode of cognition (and corresponding user needs) that dominate the exploratory phase. Explorations conducted with Wheelsong demonstrate that the platform embraces broad stylistic and cultural ranges of output. Experiments comparing the creative merits of early-stage, fragmentary outputs produced by Wheelsong against those produced by traditional representation schemes show a substantial improvement in both subjective quality and diversity indicators adhering to the structurally produced candidates, as measured by human judges.

Cette thèse porte sur les propriétés du discours de la caméra virtuelle autour de trois axes: le temps, l'histoire, et la présentation visuelle. Nous nous répondrons principalement à la question sur la façon d'analyser, d'exploiter des données, et de générer automatiquement des arrangements temporels de l'histoire et des contenus visuels. Nos techniques proposées peuvent être appliquées aux problèmes de planification automatique de la caméra dans des environnements 3D, et ouvrent des perspectives pour l'analyse cognitive du cinéma et de la narration visuelle. / This thesis concerns the discourse properties of cinematographic storytelling around three axes: time, story, and visual presentation. We address the question of how to analyse and gain knowledge from data, and automatically generate temporal arrangements of story and their visual content. We work with actual film data to understand the good practices of visual storytelling. The techniques in this thesis target applications to automatic camera planning problems in 3D environments, and also open perspectives for cognitive analysis of film and visual storytelling.