This paper presents a system for compact and intuitive video summarisation aimed at both high-end professional production environments and small-screen portable devices. To represent large amounts of information in the form of a video key-frame summary, this paper studies the narrative grammar of comics, and using its universal and intuitive rules, lays out visual summaries in an efficient and user-centered way. In addition, the system exploits visual attention modelling and rapid serial visual presentation to generate highly compact summaries on mobile devices. A robust real-time algorithm for key-frame extraction is presented. The system ranks importance of key-frame sizes in the final layout by balancing the dominant visual representability and discovery of unanticipated content utilising a specific cost function and an unsupervised robust spectral clustering technique. A final layout is created using an optimisation algorithm based on dynamic programming. Algorithm efficiency and robustness are demonstrated by comparing the results with a manually labelled ground truth and with optimal panelling solutions.