Dream&Tell: an automated multimedia story maker

Abstract

Digital stories nowadays are being presented in increasingly engaging and interactive ways through the inclusion of multimedia content from animated graphics to audio effects, making them especially suitable for engaging children and cultivating their literacy abilities. However, there is a high barrier of entry to creating these multimedia stories, requiring technical skills like programming knowledge, and a good grasp of visual design. As such, this project aims to build a web application that allows users to make their own multimedia stories without any technical abilities or design knowledge, through a partially automated process. This web application, named “Dream&Tell”, will take text input from the user, and utilise natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract keywords from the story. These keywords will then be used to automatically search for media material online, such as images and sound effects. Taking the original text and the media materials, the application will then present the story in a series of multimedia pages based on a set of pre-designed templates. Each story will include interactive elements, such as words that can be clicked on to produce sound effects. At the same time, customisation features will also be provided for the user to tweak their story to their liking, giving them room for personalisation. The front-end of this web application was coded in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, while the backend of the web application was coded in the Laravel 8 PHP framework.