ReelFramer: Human-AI Co-Creation for News-to-Video Translation

Short videos on social media are the dominant way young people consume content. News outlets would like to reach audiences through news reels - short videos that convey news - but struggle to translate traditional journalistic formats into short, colloquial videos. Generative AI has the potential to transform content but often fails to be correct and coherent by itself. To help journalists create scripts and storyboards for news reels, we introduce a human-AI co-creative system called ReelFramer. It uses an intermediate step of framing and foundation to guide AI toward better outputs. We introduce three narrative framings to balance information and entertainment in news reels. The foundation for the script is a premise, and the foundation for the storyboard is a character board. Our studies show that the premise helps generate more relevant and coherent scripts and that co-creating with AI lowers journalists' barriers to making their first news reels.