Building Stories with Tropes

Stories are the pillars of human cultures. They shape our imagination, forge our understanding of the world, and empower people to share their ideas. Although great stories rarely fit into any particular box, stories can be highly structured at their core. Viewed as a timeline, stories are made up of climaxes and resolutions, while thematically they revolve around recurring motifs and values. In filmmaking, camera and sound techniques can powerfully influence audience perceptions. In this work, we explore the use of tropes as a tool for analyzing and creating stories. Tropes are recurrent storytelling devices that can be found across many different genres and media, from literature and film to television and video games. We present TaleStream, a mood board system that provides suggestions of story ideas in the form of tropes by leveraging crowdsourced data extracted from the wiki tvtropes.com. We demonstrate the usability and effectiveness of TaleStream in facilitating the ideation process of stories and analyze the key role played by tropes in this context.

Speaker: Jean-Peic Chou

Room 126