Scrolly2Reel: Turning News Graphics into TikToks by Adjusting Narrative Beats and Pacing

As media evolves, storytelling evolves. In 2012, newspapers introduced scrollytelling sequences, or "scrollies," to make news more immersive and interactive on the web. As users scroll through an article, graphics like animation, charts, and 3D visualizations appear to provide visual dynamics to the story. Today, news consumption is shifting to short-video platforms like TikTok, particularly among younger audiences. We propose repurposing the assets from scrollies and computationally transform them into videos. By shortening the original written text and precisely synchronizing the timing of audio narrative with features in the visual scrolling assets, we can create reels with dynamic pacing and narrative beats. We argue that text shortening is essential to producing fast paced videos that are compelling and visually interesting, and show that when beats are preserved in the output reel, topical alignment between them and the visual assets is crucial to the viewing experience. Understanding narrative pacing and beats in creative forms is key to user experience of media. They are an important primitive to effective editing, repurposing, and retargeting content while maintaining a cohesive narrative.