All it takes is answering 20 basic questions about the story in your head. In an instant, you‘ll get more than 30 storylines found in films and animations that have similar storylines.

The storyline will be the basic framework through which you can add details and explanations to create your own unique story.

“Story Helper,” designed by Lee In-hwa, a professor at Ewha Womans University, is an easy-to-use Web-based program designed to help amateur writers to map out and structure their storylines more effectively.

The program, whose service started on July 12, has attracted more than 10,000 users in just one week.

“A plot is just another tool for the writer and our program stores a lot of plots that exist out there. Users just have to pick one from the database,” said Lee, also a writer of best-selling novels.

Lee developed the program by extracting 116,800 different plots from 1,406 movies and animations with the help of 96 researchers over three years.

“It was a very time-consuming job since it took at least 24 hours to analyze a single storyline. We broke up the story plot by plot and tagged each scene with keywords and descriptions,” said the professor. Users can adjust their scenarios by searching specific scenes tagged with detailed descriptions.

Major game developer NCsoft provided the funding for the project, which is now available to the public free of charge. The service is now accessible at www.storyhelper.co.kr.

Jin Eun-soo, Intern reporter
(janna924@heraldcorp.com)