DramaDirector: Geometry-Guided Short Drama Generation

Short dramas combine rapid shot rhythms, dialogue-driven focus shifts, and frame-level spatial constraints that are often underspecified by text-only generation pipelines. We study plot-to-short-drama generation, where a global plot and local context are transformed into a structured storyboard and then realized as a multi-shot video. We propose DramaDirector, a geometry-guided framework that connects storyboard planning to visual realization through two coupled components. First, it retrieves appearance-reduced depth–pose references from real short-drama shots to provide reusable priors for spatial layout and body configuration. Second, it uses the learned retrievability of generated storyboard conditions as a GRPO training signal, encouraging the planner to produce descriptions that can be grounded by the downstream visual pipeline. Static visual and dynamic narrative conditions serve as the interface for first-frame generation and image-to-video synthesis. We also introduce DramaBoard, a benchmark built from 35 live-action dramas and 2,826 episodes with shot annotations (101,763 shot records); its Continuation subset contains 2,807 episodes and 81,283 shots, with structured storyboards and multi-dimensional evaluation protocols. In the reported benchmark tables, DramaDirector has higher or competitive values than representative agentic and video-generation baselines on several narrative-quality, instruction-following, and intrinsic-video-quality metrics; these comparisons are preserved from the submission record rather than newly rerun in the current artifact snapshot. Our code is anonymously released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DramaDirector-7484/