 Please welcome Adam and Tom. So we're actually some of the students that make up a small fraction of the graphic novel project. Adam and Tom, or at least Adam, are out in the audience right now. They provided a lot of guidance for us. So this project brought together very academically diverse group of people. So I'm Adam Cole. I'm studying biology at Stanford. I'm Albert Lai. I'm currently studying the science, technology, and society. Hi, I'm Joy Henry. I study chemistry. And I'm Rianne Westerland. I studied English and creative writing. I'm just going to tell you a little bit about the graphic novel project. So the objective of the course is to collaboratively create a graphic novel in six weeks, which for us turned into six months. The only stipulations were it had to be a story sourced in the real world. It should be a story that needed to be told, should make a positive impact, and it should be something that was fun to illustrate. So Virunga was the chosen story. It was inspired by a BBC article that I read about Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa. And the eastern region of the DRC, which is where Virunga is located, is the site of the world's deadliest conflict since World War II. And the article that I read focused on park rangers who risked their lives to protect the wildlife there, including a huge population of mountain gorillas. And so at the time of the article, several of the gorillas had been murdered, not poached, but shot and left for the rangers to discover for no apparent reason. But this is the backdrop around which we created our characters for rangers, including a female ranger who was modeled after the first female ranger in Virunga and Malika, who was an 11-year-old girl living in a refugee camp on the edge of Virunga. So creating the plot and writing the dialogue collaboratively was extremely difficult for the writers, even in small teams. But the result was a story that would not be as extraordinary as it is without each and every one of our talents. Virunga is a story of war, child soldiers, illegal cold trade, rebels, and sexual violence. But it's also Malika's story. And she's an artist, so she sees the world a little differently. So it's a story of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. So we're going to take you through a bit of our process doing the graphic novel. Because of our crazy time constraints, all the writers first got together and we sketched out an entire plot and divided it up into acts with which there are a couple of plot points to hit. This led us to split up into two different groups, each of which we could work on acts simultaneously. What I have up on the screen right now is actually one of our first drafts of Act 3. You can sort of figure that out by the sort of ant-filled plant insertion in the middle over there. But we try to blaze through the act, try to hit the plot points, and figure out what we want the characters to do and where we want them to be. At this point, we don't really pay attention to the sort of important stuff like characterization, pacing, or whether they could actually feasibly display this in a graphic novel format. But once we figure this out, we sort of go through it, go through our second pass through our writers and sort of decide what we want to do with the characters. We tidy up the dialogue, we fix the stage directions, and we sort of make it flow much better, make it come alive. After this, we sort of pass it on to thumbnails who then decide how it's actually presented. Right, so at the beginning of the quarter, about a third of us were on the thumb nailing team, and so we would take the script that the writers had created that you can see up on the right side of the screen here and sort of map it out in a storyboard fashion. And then each of the dialogue bits are numbered and placed in this thumbnail. So the idea is the thumbnails are an intermediate step in between the writers and illustrators. And so hopefully, if the thumbnails have done their job, an illustrator will look at this page and know the basic positions of all the characters, where they're going to be, who we're looking at, and what they're saying. And so to sort of streamline this, we did all our pages on a two by three grid, basically. There was a lot of variation from that, but this was our basic setup. So once the thumbnail is sent on to an illustrator, this page becomes this page. And you can see we have the characters in basically the positions. And so this is all penciled in. And the dialogue is added by hand. And then through the inking process, we get to this, a finished inked page with none of the words added. So once we get to this page, the artists are more or less finished with the project. This is then given to me, who I scan the pages into the computer at a high resolution and sort of help out the artist a bit by spot what's in what we call spotting the blacks, which are some of the pages you see that are filled in black and it's laborious for the artists to sort of color that in themselves. So I can help them out by adding it digitally. After scanning it in, we then import it into a PDF, where we finally sort of add the text into the project and sort of this is what the printer sees. The file we use is anime ace two. And I think we're all very pleased with how it turned out. Yeah. So yeah, we actually, this is today, we got for the first time, it's the first time we've held this book in our hands. So we're all very excited. So yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.