[heroic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer Alex Teplish.

Alex, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thank you for having me, Terence.

- Alex, you are the writer of a graphic novel called Survivor Aron's Story.

So what is this graphic novel about?

So the graphic novel is based on my grandfather's true story of survival during the Holocaust and during World War II.

He gave an interview or a testimony to the Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg back in 1996, which I translated and put into a storyline and it eventually led to my graphic novel.

- I had a chance to look at the pages that you sent over.

It is a powerful story about a young boy who is sort of thrown into a situation that no one wants to go through, let alone a small child.

So his perception of things is what comes through in these events.

And the little things that mean so much to him that we as an adult audience are able to figure out a little bit more than this character, this boy is able to figure out.

But what makes what you're doing so special is that there's an educational component to this graphic novel.

Could you talk a little about that?

- So the project actually evolved since its inception.

I originally was going to just tell my grandfather's story because it was so, so outrageous and one of the least documented episodes of the Holocaust.

I felt like it needed to be shared with the world.

But as I told his story, a lot of questions came to mind about the history.

And I knew that the readers who aren't as familiar as I am with that background would have their own questions.

So I created a second half of the book, which is a summary of the historical context, all the precursors that led to World War II, that led to the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, the occurrences during the war, and then some of the aftermath as well.

One of the things that you are doing right now is making content available for, I guess, schools to use and to cover this piece of history.

Alongside the book, I've been conducting a multimedia presentation for a variety of groups for about nine years now.

The presentation and the book itself evolved into another project, which I released in 2022, which is an interactive virtual museum available free of charge, 24/7 off of the website.

People can immerse themselves into a virtual museum, walk around through the exhibits, watch the videos of my grandfather speaking about his memories, see the artwork overlaid over his memories, interact with digital artifacts.

And all of these components have now been packaged and expanded on into a 6-12 curriculum, starting on the West Coast through the California Teachers Collaborative.

- It's difficult to write history.

It's difficult to write unpleasant history, and it's difficult to write it in a way that connects to students who are trying to learn something in elementary through high school.

As you are, I guess, trying to put together a material that will appeal to a wide group of ages, are you sort of tailoring it to the certain grades and saying, "If I write it this way, it'll reach this audience better than if I write it this way, it'll be better for the older reader"?

- Well, the way I saw it was that there were many novels and movies on the subject matter, but yet the younger generation is becoming more and more disconnected from that part of history and unaware of what took place.

So I felt like a graphic novel was a great approach to a wider audience, to a diverse set of ages and backgrounds.

And that's why I chose that format to tell the story in that way.

Also the fact that my grandfather was a child around when this started, around 12 years old when his experience began, I felt like the younger readers would relate more to seeing that experience from a young person's perspective.

- You chose to present this history as a graphic novel.

It shows that the medium, the sequential storytelling form of the graphic novel, the comic, it just shows the power of the medium that we're able to tell complex stories to a variety of audiences through sequential art.

So as you are starting to put together your grandfather's story and you make that move into the graphic novel format, how do you convert it into a way that your artistic collaborator can visualize what you want on that page so that you can go ahead and hit us with those emotional moments and that dialogue that is right to the point rather than having to describe the scene of the room that they're in?

- Yeah, so it was a complex process.

First, taking my grandfather's interview, which he conducted in Russian, translating that into English, verifying all the historical facts.

My grandfather had an amazing memory, even at his older age, of the dates, the towns, the experiences that they had.

So I verified a lot of that through historical records.

Finding historical imagery that I can provide to the artists so that everything can be as historically accurate as possible.

I really wanted accuracy.

I wanted realism.

Writing out every panel that's in the graphic novel as a textual description, supporting documentation, supporting imagery, all of that was provided to the artists who created this work.

One important and interesting backstory is that many people don't know that it was the Romanian army were allied with the Nazis, allied with Germany and the Nazis, and the Romanian army were the ones that occupied and invaded the city where we're from, where my grandfather had his experience, which is Odessa, Ukraine.

I worked with a modern-day team of Romanian artists based in Romania who created the art for the book, and they learned a lot of the history that their country inflicted on people that they didn't necessarily learn through their own educational curriculum.

So it was very important to work with them.

They learned a lot, and it was meaningful to everybody on the project.

This really raises a lot of questions because we can wonder why something like this isn't studied more, and why contemporary students aren't aware of the Holocaust the way that people our age were familiar with it.

So in your research, you said you're coming across things that other folks didn't know, people in Europe didn't know.

So how are you digging in and finding this information?

I mean, yes, there are scholarly works and whatnot, but if it's not here in this country, are you having to go into archives in other countries?

Is this something that you're doing strictly on the web?

How do you do that research?

- I mean, it's really a combination of many sources, books, online resources, resources in other languages, working with Holocaust scholars to verify that my information is correct, going to museums on the subject matter, really bringing all of that together and putting it into the storyline.

Again, I wanted to make sure that it was historically accurate, that it was true to my grandfather's experience, and I think that the book really put that all together.

- As you are working with this team of artists, there's a certain look that you've gone for in the, I guess, the color palette.

And is this something that you've envisioned ahead of time, or is this something where they're reading what you've given them, and they're saying, "You know what?

I think that this particular palette, this muted tone, or this almost sepia look here would be the way to go."

So I'm just wondering how this collaboration works with the visuals.

- Yeah, actually, it was one of my ideas to have this certain type of palette that gave it a historical feel, almost like footage that we restore with color, but not full color.

Also, it's not a typical graphic novel, comic book, cartoon, so I didn't want to use such bright colors.

I really wanted to give it the realism, but also a historical look and feel.

And working back and forth with the artists until we came to a nice palette is what the process was like.

- And as you are working to get the book published and into the hands of educators, how do you sort of negotiate that path?

Because it's not the easiest thing to do to get a book that is on a very touchy subject in world history, not only to get it published, but in this new form, this graphic novel form, but then to get it accessible for educators in California.

How do you sort of find your path?

- Yeah, it's also been a long evolution.

I mean, the book came out in 2015.

I've been doing the multimedia presentations for many years, and this is outside of my full-time job.

So I really have been networking with people, educators, museums, scholars.

There's an organization called the Network for Innovative Holocaust Educators that I'm a part of.

I also collaborated with a group called Avenues for Change out of California, who brought me into the California Teachers Collaborative, gotten the book into several different school curriculum, both locally and other parts of the world.

I even worked with an educator in a completely different country and worked with their students, answering questions through social media on their classroom.

So it's a continued evolving process, and I continue to look for more schools, more educators, organizations that we can help create this information.

- And this, I guess, brings us to how you and I connected.

You sent me a message on social media, basically saying that you've got this really interesting project, and this would be something that you'd like to talk to me about.

And once I saw what you were doing, I thought, "Absolutely, this is something that we should share."

So I'm wondering, as somebody who, as you say, has another job, how do you schedule your time so that you are able to continue work on something that's obviously very important to you, very important to the education of others, and also connect to other people through social media?

How do you organize that time and make sure that you're able to do everything that you need to do and still be able to take care of the stuff that isn't quite as much a passion for you, like going to work every day?

- Well, I do consider this one of my most important passion projects outside of work and my family.

A lot of people ask me about how I find the time, how I organize my time.

A lot of it has to do with reducing commute, reducing time that may be considered not productive.

Using technology.

I've been in technology for my entire career, for 27 plus years.

Using technology to my advantage.

Now with AI, I have a lot of tools that help me organize my time, organize my messaging, myself, my documentation.

Really, using technology has helped me a great, great amount.

But there's a saying that, in Russian, actually, "The slower you drive, the further you'll get."

And I truly believe that.

It's not like, because this was a personal passion project, there was no deadline given to me by a boss.

I take my time, I keep moving forward, and I have another ultimate goal that I'm working towards at the moment.

- I think, first of all, that's a great expression.

If you try to get into something and you burn yourself out on it, you're never going to see that project come to fruition.

But if you are methodical in your approach, you're going to get more done because you give yourself a chance to appreciate and to learn what works and what doesn't work, and I guess renew that passion every single time that you have the chance to sit down and work on it.

As you are working on this project over the course of years, you said that you're using other technologies to help you, like AI.

We talked a little bit the other day about some of the other uses that you have for AI.

I'm thinking of that one video that you shared with me of your grandfather, but it's really not your grandfather.

It's something that you created in AI.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experiences with this new form of creation.

- A new media, which is AI filmmaking, which has come in very diverse shapes and sizes.

What I did was I took the illustrations from the book, which were hand-drawn by artists, and I used AI to create slight animations to each panel.

Not every panel in the book, but the ones that I felt were important for the video.

I also took one of the panels that was an illustration of my grandfather telling the story.

I used technology to lip sync him speaking about how he's passing down this story to the new generation of readers, and how we must not forget this important history.

It shouldn't be wiped out from the book of history.

That's something that I've been working with heavily in the last few years.

And my current goal for this project is to adapt it into an animated miniseries, or animated film, one or the other, potentially using AI as well, which will reduce the budget, enhance the visuals, and help create the story without having to come up with millions of dollars that a typical animated feature costs.

You know, when it comes to delivering a message, we've seen an evolution of tools when we think of animation.

We think of the classic, you know, like a Warner Brothers or a Disney cartoon when it's cell animation.

And then we start to see this switch over to computer-generated animation with shows maybe like The Simpsons, even making that switch from cell to this computer style of animation.

So, as you are trying to adapt this graphic novel into this moving video, what sort of changes do you have to make to your script in order to make it work better for that medium than what it would work effectively for on the page of a printed book?

- Yeah, and it's also a comparison of animation to graphic novels, where in a graphic novel, you may show a panel that depicts a scene and gives the reader a chance to use their imagination and connect one scene to the next, versus an animated film or a series where you need to really have consistency in different angles of the same scene, consistency in characters, really expanding on the dialogue as well, which doesn't always happen in graphic novels.

So, really an expansion of the content from the book into the animated format.

- And as you are doing this expanding of the content, you know, you have to, as a writer, you've got to fill in a little bit more of those blanks.

So, with comics, you have to be concise.

With something that is a little bit more open for you, you can be a little bit more verbose.

So, I'm wondering, as you are taking that scene that's a panel and turning it into different camera angles and maybe different voices, how do you sort of find the right thing to put into it so that it is enhancing and not just being pad?

- That takes a lot more research.

Finding actual visuals from that era, from our home city, everything down to the helmets that soldiers wore, to the guns that they used, try to be as accurate as possible without going off into a tangent into something that didn't actually happen, especially when it comes to the Holocaust.

Looking at how people spoke to one another, what kind of words they used, the accents that people had, because I do intend on telling this story in English, maybe eventually translated into other languages, to depict them in English, maybe not use a typical American accent, but have a slight Russian or Eastern European accent when they speak English to give it more of that realism.

A lot of different components that come together based on research, my own background and understanding of my family and the animated format.

- When you are talking about events that happen in another country, being in this country means that you are relying a lot on records.

Photographs, old films, that sort of thing.

So as someone who is trying to take your graphic novel and make it into a moving image, is this something where you see maybe like a picture of a square that's going to inspire you and say, "Oh, my grandfather mentioned something that happened in a square.

This could be the perfect example of that."

Or is it something where you really want to keep as close to what you know to be the history as possible, so you're looking for that specific square?

- In most cases, I'm trying to find specific locations that were actually there.

In other cases where it's something that's more general, like walking through a field of snow or a battle between soldiers, I try to focus more on the props, the facial expressions, the action.

So it really depends on each scene.

But I do want to try to remain as close to accuracy as possible.

- AI has a lot of potential.

And I'm just wondering, is this something where you are hoping to bring in voice actors or is this something where you're hoping to create a performance based on some new application that's out there?

- So I'll give you an example.

There's another AI film of mine that recently won a few awards and it's a short film.

And one of the four of the characters in this film were people speaking, elderly people speaking English with Russian accents.

Now, the AI technology that's out there is great for voiceover, but simulating exactly that accent in English, as far as I know, doesn't exist yet.

I was the actual voice actor for all four characters, but then I still layered it with an AI tool to change the voice so that it sounds like four different people.

So because of my background and my family, I was able to fake a Russian accent speaking English, but then converted it through AI tools into four different voices.

That's one tactic.

And there are many others like that, that I'll be using for this animated feature.

- Technology is changing very rapidly.

So how do you stay on top of that?

Because a project that you start now, using version X of this particular software, by the time you get to the next step, might be on YZ or might be on 2.0.

How do you not get too wrapped up in the technology so that you can focus on the stories while at the same time, keeping an open mind to the new possibilities that this other technology might bring?

There's always newer technology to make it better.

Even the classic films that everybody's familiar with, the filmmakers of those products look back and say, "I could have done it better."

And sometimes they release them with some new features.

But I believe that it's really more about the storytelling.

The storytelling comes first.

You can watch an animated film that's very simplistic in its style, but it has powerful storytelling.

And that's really number one.

So I think that the story, the storytelling, and the techniques there are even more important than the actual visuals.

The visuals do help.

And there will always be a point where I look back and say, "I could have done that better."

But I think that if the story is told properly, then it'll still have its effective impact.

- Well, I think for an artist, for a writer, there's always going to be a progression in our skills as we further along in our careers.

So no matter what we do, whether it's something with modern technology or something where it's writing out a poem in a book, when we look back at it years later, we'll always maybe cringe just that little bit.

And then years later, we'll look back at it and say, "Oh, no, that was actually pretty good."

So we're always going to have that balance between it could be better, but it's really not that bad when I look back at it.

Now, I did want to shift gears a little bit and just talk about the virtual museum that you were talking about, because this is fascinating.

The fact that I can sort of dive into the world of Aron and see what he saw in a sense.

So when you were creating this museum, is this again something where it's reference photographs, or is this going to be something that you're creating in like a 3D AI environment?

- Yeah, so for the virtual museum, which came out in 2022, there was absolutely no AI technology that I used for that.

It didn't really exist yet.

It's a combination of many things.

The environment is a 3D rendered environment, which I worked with an artist who took my sketches and put together in a realistic type of empty museum with 10 different exhibit rooms and outside lobby.

So we had the shell and the actual immersive environment.

And then using another platform and technology, I was able to add videos that I produced of my grandfather speaking with his memories overlaid with using the artwork from the book.

And then I have regular digital artifacts from historical artifacts spread out throughout the museum, the artwork, my own audio guide on pretty much every exhibit, things to read.

And although my grandfather didn't go to Auschwitz, there was a 360 degree Auschwitz photo that I utilized.

So someone can actually walk into one of the barracks and see, this is a modern day photo, see where people were held in Auschwitz, which was similar across many camps.

And I have photos in there, black and white photos of actual photos taken during World War II in that same environment.

So there's a number of different pieces that were brought together, 3D illustration, video, audio.

It's all brought together in this interactive virtual museum.

- You know, I'm thinking about your approach to telling this story through your grandfather's experiences.

And it reminds me of, let's say, Band of Brothers, which was a great way for people to learn about World War II through this particular unit and especially Major Dick Winters.

So as you are taking a very sad chapter in humanity, you are making it very relatable because you're putting it into the perspective of a young boy.

So, you know, as you are writing, how do you, I guess, capture the spirit of a young child going through horrible things that they may not fully understand, but still making it so that it's accessible to us, the reader, that we can connect with him as a character, not just think of him as, you know, the narrator in this, you know, exhibit here or, you know, pointing at this or that.

- So there's a few different approaches I've used.

Number one, this is a very sad story.

The Holocaust is a very sad time, but I tried to inject some realism, a little bit of humor in some conversations when they weren't as, the situation wasn't as tragic at the moment.

I'm bringing out the humor of the, actually the city of Odessa is known as a city of humor.

So I tried to bring that out in some of the characters that through some of the dialogue, depicting the experiences that he had, momentary experiences where someone would help him out by just giving him a piece of bread or a little bit of milk or pointing in the right direction to help save their lives.

Those are the kinds of things that, although they didn't have anybody hiding them anywhere, just along the way, having small pieces of help brought humanity to the external world.

And it really teaches a lesson to everyone.

And then in the actual, in my multimedia presentation and in the virtual museum, I try to conclude it on the topic of the civil rights movement in the United States, which many Jewish people were a part of.

And they took inspiration from the Holocaust and brought that over to the United States and basically tried to contribute to improving the country.

So that also brings in people who may not have a European or a Jewish background, but to understand that history is not a bunch of isolated events.

It's a continuation, it's a jigsaw puzzle of pieces.

And even what we're living today can still be connected to that time in history.

So by learning, by more people learning about that time of history, we can hopefully continue to make small improvements around us and see a better future.

- Now, Alex, they are telling us that we are just about out of time.

If the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about you and about Aron's story, where can they find you on the web?

- So the website for the book and the museum is Survivor Aron's Story.

That's one A in Aron, and it's two S's, Aronsstory.com.

You can find the book, you can access the museum 24/7, no charge.

And my name is Alex Teplish.

I'm on most social media platforms.

Don't have such a common name, so anybody could find me by searching my name.

And thank you for having me here.

- Well, I was gonna say thank you for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

It's been an enlightening half hour.

- Definitely, thank you again.

- I'd like to thank you at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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