GAME OF FACES : WHOSE CELEBRITIES FACES APPEARED THE MOST IN GAME OF THRONES ?
A week before season 8 launch, Reminiz Artificial intelligence processed all 7 seasons (67 episodes) of Game of Thrones and assessed length of appearance for each character’s face. What does it tell us from the show?

FACE DETECTION YOU SAID?
Reminiz artificial intelligence has recognized 351 different celebrities faces in Game of Thrones. How did it do? If you’re interested in the whole recognition story, we would recommend reading this first. But to put it in a nutshell, the main difficulty of recognition lies in the diversity of frames. A video, especially a Game of Thrones episode, is an evolving item in which each image is linked to another. It is one thing to understand an image. It is another to make assertions about causal links existing between millions of images in a same content, especially surrounded with dragons and white walkers.
The difficulty in our case is not to be able to recognize 351 different people from 351 different pictures, but rather to create a coherent web of causality and appearances, sometimes alone, sometimes together, often for a single second and less frequently for a whole minute. Why would a human not do it?
That’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in. Because a trained human is able to tag 4 images per second. A 1-hour episode would require 90.000 images to process. Indexing all Game of Thrones so far would take almost 400 hours of work, when Reminiz AI did it in a few minutes.
One important thing to remind when looking at these figures is that Reminiz facial recognition intelligence indicates time of distinctive faces appearance and does not pretend assessing full presence of a character in the show. Thus, it excludes appearances from the back, under helmets or hidden by any other item and character. Overall, it gives very precise data every time a face appears on screen and an interesting overview of the show.

COUNTLESS CHARACTERS, MINIMAL APPEARANCE
Indeed, our AI has recognized 351 different faces throughout the 67 episodes, among which 167 faces appeared more than a minute. Looking at the average time of appearance split, not only is it pretty low — only 12:33 per face- but only 10 faces appeared more than 45 minutes.
It is no big news that characters have relative short expiration dates in Game of Thrones. But the ones with longer appearances are not always the ones who outlived the others. Best case is Ned Stark, with a 39:09 minutes record of face appearance on a single season. He might have died after 9 episodes, he still ranks 13th character who appeared the most in the show.
To the contrary, some central characters have seen their appearance time reduced to minimal face exposition, such as Lyanna Mormont, Benjen Stark or even Hodor !
These data tell us a lot about a TV Show with an everchanging cast and very various fortunes for its characters. Take a glimpse at characters appearing in a single episode. Brother Ray’s face appeared more than 3 minutes in a single episode, making him an essential pillar….of the episode and no more.

POWER TO WOMEN?
It has been said countless times on Game of Thrones. The story itself has given an equal share to women characters and is slowly turning the battle for the throne into a full-girl war. Figures are slightly bit different, though encouraging. Amongst all 167 main characters, female faces appeared 38,37% of the time. This is huge in view of number of female characters amongst these 167: only 47 !
Women in Game of Thrones have less representatives but longer exposure, especially the main characters. Amongst the seven faces appearing more than an hour, 4 of them are women. Often presented as a bloody and manly tv Show, Game of Thrones actually gives a resolutely impressive share to women appearance. Does that say something from the show’s ending?
STARK VS LANNISTER
What data reveals overall when assessing each face’s time of appearance is that Game of Thrones is mainly a war between two houses: Stark and Lannisters. Characters from these two houses respectively gather 7:49 hours and 6:25 Hours of appearance, when House Targaryen is only relying on Daenerys to achieve a fair 2:20 hours.
Some of their characters have given the impression to rule over the others but somehow did not appeared as much as we would have thought. Joffrey Baratheon (27:50 Minutes) or Robb Stark (34:31) are vivid examples of how things turned quickly bad for representatives of House Stark and House Lannister.

PREDICTING THE END OF THE SHOW?
Can figures such as time of face appearance predict the end of Game of Thrones? Looking at top 10 characters appearance, the next character to die would be Jorah Mormont, quickly followed by Jaime Lannister. To the contrary, Daenerys and Tyrion would probably see it through the end.
More than predicting anything, assessing time of appearance for each character’s face is a clever way to overview what the show’s about and who’s represented in it. These data confirm that Game of Thrones is an eclectic show where length of appearance does not always prevail on a character’s importance.
Let’s see if Season 8 has something else to reveal about the game of faces…

