Time Travellers
Do you like what you see in the Friends and Heroes stories? Do the costumes fascinate you? Aren't the ships amazing to say that they were built 2000 years ago?
As Friends and Heroes was being created the team of designers and artists needed to be sure that everything you see on the screen was as real as possible and fit the time in which the story was set. That's called 'Historical Accuracy' and it was one of the key aims of Friends and Heroes - that it should be really 'real'. Although Macky and Portia were not real people, one of the Governors of Alexandria was called Tiberius and he was a Jew but totally devoted to the Romans!
To achieve as much historical accuracy as possible we used many different sources! Information from history books, encyclopedias, museums, websites, TV programmes, bible handbooks, bible scholars and, of course, the bible itself was examined and gathered together as we tried to re-create this period of history. You might want to investigate some of this information yourself - you'll find a great deal of helpful material on the internet and in your school or local library.
One of the most useful accounts - that was actually written in Roman times - is "The Jewish War" by a man called Josephus. Josephus was captured by the Romans when he was a Jewish Zealot and ended up in the employment of the Roman emperor Vespasian and wrote the history of his campaigns - and he wrote about Tiberius too!. Many history books published today still use Josephus' works as they are the nearest thing we have to an eye witness account.
In this section of our site you can go behind the scenes and see some of the information that we discovered and the artwork that was created as a result, so that every scene in the series was as accurate as possible. Remember that many of the drawings had to be simplified to make them work in our story.
You can click each picture to see a larger version and sometimes see how it was used in the series.
So get ready and let's travel back in time - become a Time Traveller...
We'll be adding Time Traveller pages regularly - do call back and see what's new!
