What happens in films?

This paper aims to contribute to the analysis and description of semantic video content by investigating what actions are important in films. We apply a corpus analysis method to identify frequently occurring phrases in texts that describe films-screenplays and audio description. Frequent words and statistically significant collocations of these words are identified in screenplays of 75 films and in audio description of 45 films. Phrases such as ´looks at´, ´turns to´, ´smiles at´ and various collocations of ´door´ were found to be common. We argue that these phrases occur frequently because they describe actions that are important story-telling elements for filmed narrative. We discuss how this knowledge helps the development of systems to structure semantic video content.