The Hero's Journey — A stortytelling template engine for ubiquitous multimedia

Digital storytelling is an effective approach to contextualized multimedia creation, management, and sharing on the Web 2.0. Professional story tellers use complex tools and templates since the early days of humankind. For example, Joseph Campbell's monomyth “The Hero's Journey” has been a successful story stereotype for many Hollywood blockbusters. However, Web 2.0 depends on user generated content with questionable quality sometimes. So the “amateur” Web 2.0 multimedia producers still need simple support to tell good stories. This paper proposes the application of `professional' story templates to enhance (nonlinear) digital storytelling. A template engines allows design, adaptation and mashing up of story templates. A prototype of the template engine YouTell TE was integrated in the collaborative storytelling platform. A set of case studies including mobile multimedia gaming support, mobile storytelling, and context-aware story checking shows the usefulness of the approach.