Visual Storytelling Warehouse

In this paper, we introduce the concept of Visual Storytelling Warehouse, an interactive XML-based automatic cartoonstyle visual storytelling system to generate new stories based on written story structures and user’s requirements. The Warehouse will consist of the visual and no-visual elements including characters, events, background images, and story plots. Each of these elements will be associated with some semantic meanings that can be easily interpreted for constructing stories by Visual Storytelling Warehouse. Stories will be written based on a set of XML schemas which specify essential elements to construct visual stories. Given an abstracted story structure, the Visual Storytelling Warehouse will be capable of producing multiple versions of visual stories by taking characters, background information and story plots from its database based on defined specification from the users. Each of those stories might have a variety of story elements such as different characters, events or backgrounds. The proposed Warehouse will be a highly adaptive system that can compose nested visual stories from its existing story plots. Therefore, complicated visual stories with multiple events will be generated on-the-fly by the system using simple story plots. Eventually, the Warehouse will evolve into an open system with standards that can allow artists and writers to share cartoons and stories for building a more dynamic community where more comprehensive visual stories can be produced through WWW around the world. The standards will include a set of XML schemas defining character, events, backgrounds and story structures etc.