Production and maintenance environments for interactive audio-visual stories

1. I N T R O D U C T I O N Storytelling is a pervasive aspect within our life because it helps to shape our experience by structuring events encountered in our everyday reality. Narrating means making a comment about a certain event, following an idea about the medium and form of presentation, which is grounded in one's own motivational and psychological attributes. Narrating is a targeted phenomenon. There is a receiver and the narrator's perception of him or her may have an impact on the outcome of the story. Moreover, both narrator and receiver do not exist in a vacuum but share a social environment, which adds extra structures to the narrational process. Thus, narration is a dynamic process of interaction in a partly given social context, where 'the interaction encompasses ... the communicator, the content, the audience and the situation' [12, p. 209].