The analysis of multimodal data benefits from meaningful search and retrieval. This paper investigates strategies of searching multimodal data for event patterns. Through three longitudinal case studies, we observed researchers exploring and identifying event patterns in multimodal data. The events were extracted from different multimedia signal sources ranging from annotated video transcripts to interaction logs. Each researcher's data has varying temporal characteristics (e.g., sparse, dense, or clustered) that posed several challenges for identifying relevant patterns. We identify unique search strategies and better understand the aspects that contributed to each.