Is there some website which has total screentime for each character in minutes since the beginning of Season 1? It would be really interesting to see it

I don't think anyone has ever tried to calculate it but depending on how obsessive you are, you can be the first. :biggrin: You can compare each character by season and to each other. Other then the obvious like Jack being at the top and Claire at the bottom, it would be interesting to see.

I think it would be a cool idea as well. You could use the losthatch transcripts (http://www.losthatch.com/transcripts.aspx) as a rough estimate. For example, when I ran a search for Jack (not specifying a particular episode and excluding action text), it turned up 2133 lines. Claire had 625. Sayid (since Naveen was the focus of some of those articles linked above) had 1004. This wouldn't be sentences exactly, but times the character spoke.

I'd be willing to calculate more of the characters, but don't have the time right this moment.

This sounds like a pretty neat idea. I'm much the data-phile and always love a reason to re-watch past eppys. Anybody in for a community type deal, i.e. everybody picks a char, and time how long they're in each eppy? Yeah, a lot of work, but come on! It's LOST! Perhaps this is better suited over the summer/fall break...but I'm getting a head start on - Vincent!

NotEarl, I think I'm correct in assuming you mean "presence" as appearing on screen? This is what I was thinking about logging and, along with my trusty chronographer, plan to start doing. Lines-wise, J-Lee is right in pointing out the losthatch transcripts (http://www.losthatch.com/transcripts.aspx) as reference, and since this would be a simple search-and-add mission, it shouldn't take much time at all unless people want the nitty gritty like "woman on telephone backstage-left."

This sounds like a pretty neat idea. I'm much the data-phile and always love a reason to re-watch past eppys. Anybody in for a community type deal, i.e. everybody picks a char, and time how long they're in each eppy? Yeah, a lot of work, but come on! It's LOST! Perhaps this is better suited over the summer/fall break...but I'm getting a head start on - Vincent!

It would be a better idea if each person tackles one episode and logs the screentime for all the characters in that episode character. That way if there are 20 -30 people each person would only have to watch and log only about 2 episodes which is not that bad.

Jynes, the only problem with that method is that, since my goal is truly grand in scope and scale, unless you had many, many, stopwatches, you'd have to watch each episode over and over again to make sure each character was logged; i.e. watch 'Pilot' once to log Vincent appearances, once to log Jack appearances, etc.

Now, my hope is for enough volunteers (with nothing better to do) that we could split each job into season long track-sessions. I.E. In my view, the easiest way to track is to focus on a character, and stick with that character for each episode.

Who knows...maybe Vincent only shows up for 4 minutes every 8th episode ;)

This would be neat to see, though it would be a lot of work.

One method could be to assign a point to each character for every episode, which makes it easier to do than timing with a stopwatch.

0 points - not in episode at all
1 point - seen in episode in the background with no lines
3 points - in episode with 1-2 lines or one short scene
10 points - in episode with a smaller part in a minor subplot on island (B plot or C plot)
15 points - in episode with a large part in a minor subplot on island (B plot or C plot)
or a smaller part in the major subplot on island (A plot)
20 points - in episode with a large part in the major subplot on island (A plot)
40 points - in episode with major subplot and focus of flashbacks

So for "Left Behind", it would be:

Jack 3
Kate 40
Locke 3
Sayid 3
Juliet 20
Ben 0
Sawyer 15
Charlie 3
Hurley 10
Sun 3
Jin 3
Desmond 3
Claire 3

It's very subjective, of course, in relation to how many points for each category, and also where each character would fit in each episode. It would be more consistent for several people to do it for all the episodes, and then average their results.