We presented a progress report on the the search for filmic narrative strategies in audiovisual news reporting at the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image Conference (SCSMI) 2024 in Budapest.
Audiovisual news reporting is now documented to involve many filmic techniques that bring news reporting ever closer to audiovisual storytelling. At SCSMI-2022 we introduced our FakeNarratives project, which undertakes a contrastive cataloguing of filmic narrative strategies in both mainstream and alternative news media to support the location of potentially problematic messaging. We now discuss the progress that has been made towards automating the recognition of filmic structures using diverse computational techniques for audiovisual processing. Results are maintained in a searchable richly annotated graph structure, allowing us to define narrative patterns in terms of formal combinations of filmic features present in the graph. By these means, we increase the scale of data on which filmic narrative patterns can be derived, empirically validated, and productively visualised. As the analytic framework is oriented to audiovisual material in general, we also show how aspects of the account may contribute to film research more broadly.