Scrolly2Reel: Retargeting Graphics for Social Media Using Narrative Beats

Content retargeting is crucial for social media creators. Once great content is created, it is important to reach as broad an audience as possible. This is particularly important in journalism where younger audiences are shifting away from print and towards short-video platforms. Many newspapers already create rich graphics for the web that they want to be able to reuse for social media. One example is scrollytelling sequences or "scrollies" -- immersive articles with graphics like animation, charts, and 3D visualizations that appear as a user scrolls. We present a system that helps transform scrollies into social media videos. By using the scriptwriting concept of narrative beats to extract fundamental storytelling units, we can create videos that are more aligned with narration, and allow for better pacing and stylistic changes. Narrative beats are thus an important primitive to retargeting content that matches the style of a new medium while maintaining the cohesiveness of the original content.