Creating personal narratives helps people build meaning
around their experiences. However, novices lack the knowledge
and experience to create stories with strong narrative
structure. Current storytelling tools often structure novice
work through templates, enforcing a linear creative process
that asks novices for materials they may not have. In this paper,
we propose scaffolding creative work using storytelling
patterns extracted from stories created by experts. Patterns
are modular sets of related camera shots that expert videographers
commonly use to achieve a specific narrative function.
After identifying a set of patterns from high-quality
storytelling videos, we created Motif, a mobile video storytelling
application that allows users to construct video stories
by combining these patterns. By making existing solutions
used by experts available to novices, we encourage capturing
shots with story structure and narrative goals in mind. In a
controlled study where we asked participants to create travel
video stories, videos created with patterns conveyed stronger
narrative structure and were considered higher quality by expert
evaluators than videos created without patterns.
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