Intent-in-the-Loop: Explicit Cinematographic Intent for 3D Dance Camera Synthesis

Synthesizing 3D camera trajectories from music and dance requires more than generating plausible camera motion; it requires translating high-level cinematographic intent into precise and dynamically expressive camera movements. Existing methods have made substantial progress by directly mapping music and dance to camera trajectories. However, they leave cinematographic intent implicit and provide no explicit mechanism for verifying whether the generated trajectory reflects that intent. We introduce Intent-in-the-Loop, a closed-loop framework that makes cinematographic intent explicit and verifiable through a plan–generate–align process. First, in plan, we plan shot-level cinematographic intent from music and 3D dance motion. Second, in generate, we generate a camera trajectory in a coarse-to-fine manner conditioned on the planned intent. Third, in align, we recover intent from the output trajectory and align it with its planned intent during training. This loop improves consistency between planned intent and generated trajectories. Extensive experiments on the DCM dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art camera trajectory quality, substantially smoother motion dynamics, and improved GT-intent fidelity, while providing explicit shot-level interpretability. Our source code will be publicly available upon publication.