This paper presents work on the semantic annotation of a multimodal corpus of english television news. the annotation is performed on the second-by-second-aligned transcript layer, adding verb frame categories and semantic roles on top of a morphosyntactic analysis with full dependency information. we use a rule-based method, where constraint grammar mapping rules are automically generated from a syntactically anchored framenet with about 500 frame types and 50 semanic role types. we discuss design decisions concerning the framenet, and evaluate the converage and performance of the pilot system on authentic news data.