Tales of a Time Traveler: Honours Diary

For my honours project I wanted to do something completely unique and different from anyone else. At the same time. I wanted to do something that would give me the opportunity to create a wide range of art work, so I came up with the idea of creating a short story s that would revolve around a blog. I wanted the blog to tell a story as well as have pictures which would give me the opportunity of doing some narrative-story work as well as my final idea. This was to do a time traveller,s blog where the time traveller would tell the stories of his various adventures in distant lands and across time, giving me a wide range to work with. The blog will consist of two parts. The first part will be the time traveller's story. The second part will act as a production diary where I explain and display my ideas and concepts for the project.

I started off by creating this fictional blog for my character how will feacher in the short story. Has a began my research in to this I found that There are many character blogs on the Internet, and it has recently become popular among games and TV show producers as a means of promoting their work . In the last few they have also become an outlet for fans of TV shows, games, movies, and comic book, to play and interact with characters.

I discovered in my research that there are three types of fictional character blogs the first is Official Character Blogs created by companies which will publish an official blog for their characters. These are often produced for marketing purposes. The second is an Unofficial Character Blog which are usually set up by fans of certain genres is very apparent in the star wars universe with the most famous example being Master Yoda's Blog which is popular with fans. The third and final type of blog used in this way are Fantasy Character Blogs which is choose to create their own original characters and story all of these kinds of blogs have grown in popularity over the years

After this I started researching other stories about time travel. For ideas I looked at some of the more famous stories like The Time Machine by H. G. Wells as well as some more obscure stories, like Ray Bradbury's science fiction short A Sound of Thunder, which was suggested by my tutors. It tells the story of a hunter named Eckels who pays to go travelling back into the past on a guided safari to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex. However Eckels eventually changes the future because of his actions. When he gets back to the present he notices subtle changes like words are now spelt strangely and people behave differently, and so Eckels must travel back into the past to undo the damage he had caused.

I started by designing the main character, the time traveller himself. I wanted to portray him as an explorer always looking for new adventure, so I created my first mood board where I researched famous fictional explorers like Indiana Jones and Nathan Drake. Although they don't use time machines they have a kind of adventurer's spirit that I wanted to replicate in my own character.

Character Mood board 1

Character Mood board 2

One thing that became clear was that many of the characters I looked at have similar fashions. For example both Nathan Drake and Indiana Jones wear very similar 1940s and 50s style clothes. Another example of old fashioned clothes that occurred to me was the Time Traveller by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine. I decided to take elements from this when designing my own character.

Character Concepts

I wanted my time traveller to have originally come from an early period of time, so I decided to show this in his clothing and styles. At the same time however I was thinking of adding components from the future that he might have acquired on his previous adventures.

Early character concept for the traveller showing possible future gadgets

Here are Character designs and facial expressions. I wanted my traveller to be a little bad tempered

Character design colour version

The time machine itself has been quite tricky to design, so I decided to gathers some more mood boards of famous time machines. After looking at some of these time machines I decided I wanted to design something that would enclose the character in a confined space as it travelled through time, like Doctor Who's' Tardis or the Delorean from Back to the Future.