A clever piece of software has been developed in China to turn film into a comic strip.

Movie2Comics, developed at the Hefei University of Technology, converts any film into a comic using sophisticated technology and is the first software of its kind to be fully automated.

The process analyses a film, identifies the characters via facial recognition, and then takes screen-grabs of the action. Once completed, it shuffles and orders them to tell a coherent story, then converts them into a comic panel format. Finally speech bubbles can be added, and the finished images rendered into a chosen style - a cartoon or an anime. The resulting images are very blocky and are not animated.

A professor at the university said: "We have two future plans - firstly, to improve the performance of each component and to generate perfect clips without user interaction, and secondly, to integrate speech recognition technology so we can generate comics without movie scripts."