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.