A semiotic approach to narrative manipulation

In the design of multimedia communication artifacts few, if any, tools support the early stage of a creative process: the heuristic project. In this work we give a proof of concept of an application addressed to a specific kind of heuristic project: given the logical sequence of episodes of a narrative, the fabula, the goal is to obtain different plots expressed in multi-modal language. The case study is provided by the task of transposing a written synopsis to the multi-modal language of a movie. We adopted the semiotic theory of Greimas to analyze the narrative and reveal its deep structure. The application enables users to interact with this structure in order to simulate and anticipate the effects of meaning resulting from their manipulation.