Hey look! I have the Season Five numbers of Whose Show Is It Anyway? ready! Previous entries can be found at the
Whose Show Is It Anyway? tag.
S4 brought some interesting changes with it, as does S5. Riley leaves midway through, Spike's role gets larger, and Dawn swoops in to get a large share of the screentime.
The Methodology section is a cut and paste job as my method has remained the same. Feel free to skip over it to get to the good stuff (the results).
Methodology:
The method used for this project came about as a result of the intended goal: to compare characters' screentime and line count to see what trends arise throughout the seasons.
The characters involved include all characters who ever had a spot in the opening credit plus Faith. This means that characters who guest star before or after their regular stint still have their lines counted.
I used the transcripts and shooting scripts available on
BuffyWorld.
For the line counts:
I first manually went through each transcript, tallying down both the number of lines, total, and the number of lines for each characters. Given that relative numbers are more important than actual numbers, I needed to be able to figure out what percentage of lines each character had in an episode. For this, I needed the total number of lines, even those spoken by incidental characters. The percentage is then simply calculated relative to the amount of lines in the episode (This includes lines by minor characters who are not under assessment).
All numbers were double-checked by opening the transcript in Notepad++ and doing an automated count of the number of times "CHARACTERNAME:" shows up. The manual read-through was necessary to catch any transcription errors or off formatting, while the automated check, obviously, checked my numbers.
For the scene counts:
Counting scenes was slightly more complicated. I ended up using the shooting script when possible. Each new INT or EXT shot counted as a new scene, except establishing shots (stock footage). Also, if the screenwriter labeled a scene as "CONTINUOUS", I didn't count it as a new scene. For scenes that are interrupted by an act break, I counted it as continuous so long as there's no significant time gap. Given that the important factor was figuring out a character's number of scenes relative to each episode (as opposed to comparing total number of scenes on an episode-by-episode basis), I decided that this method, while not perfect, would give satisfactory data.
In some cases in S1, a final shooting script was not available (only a writer's draft). In those cases, I attempted to use the transcript to gather the same information.
In all cases, I made sure to check with the transcript to ensure that I wasn't counting any deleted scenes (or missing any scenes that had been added in). At times, it was necessary to check screenshots to see whether a character was shown in a scene or not.
For the references:
I was able to keep track of the references while doing the line counts. The idea behind this count is to see which characters are often discussed by other characters. This would suggest that the character under discussion is of importance to the plot and to the show.
For a discussion to count, it had to take place while the subject character is not in the scene (or the characters discussing him/her are not aware of his/her presence). My general rule of thumb is that there needed to be three consecutive lines back-and-forth about the other character. Discussions among non-major characters also counted. If a discussion of a character stops and then begins again after a topic change, it's counted as two references. This is the only count that consisted of raw numbers rather than percentages, for obvious reasons.
Though I did track references for S1, I'm waiting until all seasons are completed to crunch those numbers and graph them because this aspect is more relevant in a comparative sense.
Drawbacks:
Using transcripts necessarily means being dependent on the transcribers' formatting. They may divide up a character's line by inserting an action descriptor, for instance. This would be counted as two lines for the character rather than one. Also, there's no way to differentiate between short lines and long monologues. As such, this should only serve as a rough guide, and further counts with different methodologies (especially ones incorporating actual time) will be useful.
S5:
The two Xanders in The Replacement were both counted (Cause they're both Xander, you know?). The Buffybot did not count as Buffy, however. Also, the multiple dream!Buffys in Weight of the World count as Buffy.
Click here for TXT file First, a graph showing the number of references for each character this season. Please read in the Methodology section as to what constitutes a "reference".
Then, if you total up all the lines spoken by main characters for the season, it looks like this when divided by character:
And finally, the scene and line counts throughout the season. Clicking on these pictures will take you to a larger version.
- As I usually do, I took a look to see which characters spoke more in the scenes they were in. This was done by simply dividing a character's total lines spoken by the number of scenes they had been in. Results as follows:
Buffy: 1901 lines in 367 scenes. 5.18 lines per scene.
Xander: 737 lines in 177 scenes. 4.16 lines per scene.
Willow: 793 lines in 181 scenes. 4.38 lines per scene.
Giles: 575 lines in 148 scenes. 3.89 lines per scene.
Angel: 26 lines in 5 scenes. 5.20 lines per scene.
Spike: 689 lines in 152 scenes. 4.53 lines per scene.
Anya: 444 lines in 131 scenes. 3.39 lines per scene.
Riley: 375 lines in 95 scenes. 3.95 lines per scene.
Tara: 327 lines in 119 scenes. 2.75 lines per scene.
Dawn: 604 lines in 190 scenes. 3.18 lines per scene.
And I want to continue with
local_max's method of identifying episodes that are significant and centric for each character (
here). If a character has 10% or more of the lines in an episode, it was "significant" for that character. If they had 20% or more lines, it was "centric". Let's tally!
Buffy-significant (Lines>10%): Everything.
Buffy-centric (Lines>20%): Buffy vs. Dracula, Real Me, Out of My Mind, No Place Like Home, Fool for Love, Shadow, Listening to Fear, Into the Woods, Checkpoint, Blood Ties, Crush, I Was Made to Love You, The Body, Tough Love, Spiral, and The Gift
Xander-significant (Lines>10%): Buffy vs. Dracula, Into the Woods, Triangle, The Body, Intervention, The Gift
Xander-centric (Lines>20%): The Replacement
Willow-significant (Lines>10%): Buffy vs. Dracula, The Replacement, Family, Listening to Fear, The Body, and Weight of the World
Willow-centric (Lines>20%): Triangle and Tough Love
Giles-significant (Lines>10%): Buffy vs Dracula, No Place Like Home, Shadow, Checkpoint, and The Gift
Giles-centric (Lines>20%): None
Angel-significant (Lines>10%): None
Angel-centric (Lines>20%): None
Spike-significant (Lines>10%): Out of My Mind, Forever, Intervention, and Weight of the World
Spike-centric (Lines>20%): Fool for Love and Crush
Anya-significant (Lines>10%): The Replacement
Anya-centric (Lines>20%): Triangle
Riley-significant (Lines>10%): Buffy vs. Dracula, The Replacement, Out of My Mind, Shadow, and Listening to Fear
Riley-centric (Lines>20%): Into the Woods
Tara-significant(Lines>10%): Family
Tara-centric (Lines>20%): None
Dawn-significant(Lines>10%): Real Me, No Place Like Home, The Body, and Spiral
Dawn-centric (Lines>20%): Blood Ties and Forever