The Project

To bring the ancient tale of Beowulf into the 21st century, students were challenged to reimagine the epic narrative for a modern audience. This required them to preserve core epic conventions while translating them into contemporary contexts; for example, the epic hero Beowulf might become a renowned scientist, the vast setting could be a global pandemic, and the monstrous Grendel a seemingly unstoppable, man-made virus. To effectively tell their modernized stories, students had to research and master new technologies, moving beyond the traditional essay. They utilized digital illustration software to design compelling graphic novels, learned audio production to create immersive podcasts with sound effects and scoring, or used music composition programs to craft albums that chronicled their hero's deeds of great valor. 

Would you try to outcode a powerful AI that is taking over the world, even if you had promised yourself never to code again—because coding was the very thing that got your family killed?

We chose to create a graphic novel because we felt it was the best way to bring our story to life.

By combining both text and images, we could make the plot more engaging and easier to understand.

Using AI-generated pictures also allowed us to clearly illustrate emotions, and settings in a way that words alone might not fully capture.

We believed this format would not only hold the reader’s attention but also help them connect more deeply with the story.

We were trying to display Beowulf in a futuristic setting while keeping the core epic conventions. We chose to do a Graphic Novel and we think it was the best option because we were able to explain what happens through pictures and dialogue. We believe that gets the story across in the best way possible. This story is similar to Beowulf in that it follows a lone hero, immune to the threat that plagues others, who bravely enters the monster's lair to confront and slay a powerful, man-eating creature - ultimately triumphing, but at a tragic personal cost. It was a difficult process at first trying to create AI images. We used Adobe Firefly to create images at first but the AI was not being cooperative. It would take every word very literally and sometimes just generate unrelated stuff all together. We then switched to chat gpt to create most of the images. We put this all together using adobe express and eventually I published this novel online through globalcomix so the entire world could see our creation.

We were attempting to make a 3 minute long video of a story that resembles beowolf. we did this by using sora to make a bunch of clips of tom brady unretiring and winning the superbowl and put all these clips together to make one movie.