Glee art: Being a Part of Something Special (1.01 Pilot)
Title: Being a Part of Something Special (1.01 Pilot)
Fandom: Glee
Media: Glee promotional photo, Photoshop
Inspired by the many thoughtful posts I've seen discussing Glee's portrayal of race, gender, ability, sexuality, and abuse -- and also inspired by Strange Maps, GraphJam, and sensory/motor homunculi -- I had an idea to diagram the representation of Glee's characters.
This is a chart of the show's relative focus, in the pilot episode, on each of the main characters based on the number of lines they have.
There are twelve characters who the audience is supposed to see as the main cast. They are the ones most prominent on the official site, and they appear together as a group in promotional photos. They are, we're told, who the show is about.
There are lots of different ways to talk about representation in media: Whose problems are important? Does it challenge stereotypes or does it reinscribe them? Who is a regular person and who is othered? Or from a purely quantitative standpoint, how much screentime do different characters have? Who gets the speaking parts?
The last question is not likely to be the most illuminating, but it is the easiest one to answer, so that's what I did.
SPN fandom has spoiled me for transcripts; fans usually have them up within days of the episode airing. I couldn't find any for Glee, so I used subtitles. I let a spreadsheet do the wordcounts and the math. There's some margin of error here, I'm sure, but I believe it's in the ballpark.
words%Artie Abrams 38.9Emma Pillsbury 3859.2Finn Hudson 79719.0Kurt Hummel 1112.6Mercedes Jones 1042.5Puck Puckerman 1413.4Quinn Fabray 20.5Rachel Berry 65615.6Sue Sylvester 2756.6Terri Schuester 3157.5Tina Cohen-Chang 471.1Will Schuester 130631.1 4195100.0
4195 is the total number of words spoken by just these twelve main characters; that's not all the speaking parts in the episode. I also didn't include the couple hundred words from when the glee club performs together.
If those words were divided evenly among the twelve characters, each of them would deliver 8.33%, and their heads would all be the same size (as shown in the second image, which I adapted from this source). (Or roughly the same size, allowing for bone structure and distance from the camera.) Since that is not the case, I changed the size of their heads to reflect the size of their speaking parts. Will, for example, has 31.1% of the words, which is 3.736 times more than 8.33, so I told photoshop to make his head 373.6% bigger than it started out.
These other characters had significant roles in this episode, but AFAIK are not featured in group promos:
wordsCarole Hudson 32Howard Bamboo 31Ken Tanaka 149Principal Figgins 154Sandy Ryerson 224
Santana, Brittany, Mike and Matt didn't have lines.
I'm really curious how it would look for all the episodes, averaged out. That's what I was hoping to do before I realized how scarce transcripts were. But matching up the subtitle to the speaker took three hours, and I neither love nor hate the show that much, to go to that much trouble, you know?
Like, Quinn's head would get a lot bigger, but I bet Tina's would stay the same size.
[ETA: 1.09 Wheels]
This entry was originally posted at http://gnatkip.dreamwidth.org/7793.html. If you feel moved to comment, please do so there:
Fandom: Glee
Media: Glee promotional photo, Photoshop
Inspired by the many thoughtful posts I've seen discussing Glee's portrayal of race, gender, ability, sexuality, and abuse -- and also inspired by Strange Maps, GraphJam, and sensory/motor homunculi -- I had an idea to diagram the representation of Glee's characters.
This is a chart of the show's relative focus, in the pilot episode, on each of the main characters based on the number of lines they have.
There are twelve characters who the audience is supposed to see as the main cast. They are the ones most prominent on the official site, and they appear together as a group in promotional photos. They are, we're told, who the show is about.
There are lots of different ways to talk about representation in media: Whose problems are important? Does it challenge stereotypes or does it reinscribe them? Who is a regular person and who is othered? Or from a purely quantitative standpoint, how much screentime do different characters have? Who gets the speaking parts?
The last question is not likely to be the most illuminating, but it is the easiest one to answer, so that's what I did.
SPN fandom has spoiled me for transcripts; fans usually have them up within days of the episode airing. I couldn't find any for Glee, so I used subtitles. I let a spreadsheet do the wordcounts and the math. There's some margin of error here, I'm sure, but I believe it's in the ballpark.
words%Artie Abrams 38.9Emma Pillsbury 3859.2Finn Hudson 79719.0Kurt Hummel 1112.6Mercedes Jones 1042.5Puck Puckerman 1413.4Quinn Fabray 20.5Rachel Berry 65615.6Sue Sylvester 2756.6Terri Schuester 3157.5Tina Cohen-Chang 471.1Will Schuester 130631.1 4195100.0
4195 is the total number of words spoken by just these twelve main characters; that's not all the speaking parts in the episode. I also didn't include the couple hundred words from when the glee club performs together.
If those words were divided evenly among the twelve characters, each of them would deliver 8.33%, and their heads would all be the same size (as shown in the second image, which I adapted from this source). (Or roughly the same size, allowing for bone structure and distance from the camera.) Since that is not the case, I changed the size of their heads to reflect the size of their speaking parts. Will, for example, has 31.1% of the words, which is 3.736 times more than 8.33, so I told photoshop to make his head 373.6% bigger than it started out.
These other characters had significant roles in this episode, but AFAIK are not featured in group promos:
wordsCarole Hudson 32Howard Bamboo 31Ken Tanaka 149Principal Figgins 154Sandy Ryerson 224
Santana, Brittany, Mike and Matt didn't have lines.
I'm really curious how it would look for all the episodes, averaged out. That's what I was hoping to do before I realized how scarce transcripts were. But matching up the subtitle to the speaker took three hours, and I neither love nor hate the show that much, to go to that much trouble, you know?
Like, Quinn's head would get a lot bigger, but I bet Tina's would stay the same size.
[ETA: 1.09 Wheels]
This entry was originally posted at http://gnatkip.dreamwidth.org/7793.html. If you feel moved to comment, please do so there: