My product is a series of videos that depict the various timelines to which Makoto, the main girl in "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time," jumps. I took the video from gogoanime.tv and used Adobe Premier to cut the video and recreate a timeline-like track to organize all of the jumps.
As the videos go on, Makoto has information from previous timelines, which in the movie looks fine, but in a single timeline makes little sense. You don't need to watch all of the videos to understand the movie, if you haven't seen it, but I think the Original Timeline, Makoto Resets Her Day Timeline, Harmful Effects Timeline, Kosuke Death Timeline, Stopped Time Timeline, and Final Timeline are the most important. I also included everything that happened in that timeline, so there is a lot of repeat between the videos. Feel free to jump to later sections to see what changed.
The project is to retell a story, so I immediately thought of how people have different perspectives. Particularly in media where time travel is involved, the person/people time traveling have knowledge about the effects of certain actions from a different timeline, and thus typically have a completely different perspective than others. I wanted to depict how Makoto, the main character, lives through all of the timelines, so her actions don't always make sense to the people around her. It's also interesting to see how Makoto tries to undo some of her actions, or make things better, and in the end she undoes everything. Particularly in the final timeline, Makoto goes through a crazy adventure, but from Chiaki's perspective, he's going through an ordinary day when suddenly Makoto tells him that she knows about his secrets.
The core of my project is really just depicting the events from another person's perspective, and since they don't have time-leaping abilities, they are unaware of what happens in different timelines. There are many timelines of time-traveling movies and series of DeviantArt, from which I got my inspiration. I've seen many that reconstruct the events on an actual line, but since we've been using Adobe Premier in recitation, I decided to use Premier to create a video of each timeline. My thought process was less on organizing which events happen in which timeline, but more on what people in that timeline were seeing the main character do.
The thought of time travel effects on someone who doesn't know about time travel came up when I watched Steins;Gate because the main character goes back in time and has to convince another character that he is from the future. I first considered recreating the final timeline of Steins;Gate, but considering it was 24 episodes long, it would be difficult to put all of the events together. I then chose "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" due to time constraints. After I put together the final timeline, I decided to put in all of the timelines the main character Makoto goes through, because her experiences in them are more interesting in terms of character growth. It's also interesting to see how she attempts to change something by going back a little bit, but eventually has to go further back to actually undo everything.
Heres a timeline of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time that served as inspiration:
For me, making the product and then experiencing it was very entertaining, but I realize the end product was really long. The video quality is also a bit lacking. One of the ideas I did consider was breaking down the timeline into paths, almost as a choose-your-own-adventure type video series, but some of the events don't quite work out. Some of the time jumps Makoto does don't have an actual effect. That said, the product was not made to watch every single video (watching her go to Karaoke 3 times is not that important to the story). I made it more with the purpose of helping someone understand which events still occurred on the timeline Makoto jumped to. If I had a chance to redo or revise the product, I would probably fix up the videos, such as the audio dying at the end, or create a branching timeline where each branch has a video of only the events that occur from the start of that branch to the start of another branching point.
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