The Hero's Journey - A Storytelling 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 human kind. 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 sometimes questionable quality. 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 (non-linear) digital storytelling. A template engines allows the design, the adaptation and the mashing up of 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 content checking supports the usefulness of the approach.