About This Site

This is our own contribution to the ThinkQuest World Wide Web Scholarship contest. Our team came together from the far reaches of our High School to join together in search of a common goal. We had a vision, and to achieve that vision was our only true object in life. Okay, we really just thought this would be something fun to do, and we'd all learn something as well. This site originated from several lunchtimes at McDonald's spent furiously scribbling on napkins as we tried to figure out what we were going to put into our web page. Eventually we straightened everything out, got organized and started working on what would turn out to be a very demanding project.

The original idea evolved out of our fascination with computers, and our enjoyment of movies. The first concept was to create a page on special effects in general, but it was decided that such a site would be much too large for the time period we had to work in. So the concept was abbreviated to only involve the special effects generated by computer, and then expanded to include television so that we could include the work done in that area also.

Most of the HTML coding was done in a Telnet UNIX shell or a regular word processor, then FTP'd out to our own local server space. Geoff designed the graphics using Adobe Photoshop 3.03 for Mactintosh. Our own photos were captured with a digital camera. The CGI script was downloaded from a local server, with permissions, and then modified by Dan to suit our own nefarious needs.

We'd like to thank all the people that helped us make this site a reality. Since many of the companies that we asked for copyright permissions didn't respond, we were forced to look to other areas for our inline images. We tried linking our images to sites already on the web, and were fortunate enough to find one individual, Todd Vaziri, who was very glad to help us out. Many of the images on our site come from the Visual Effects Headquarters, which Todd runs. Mike Alderson gave us some helpful suggestions, and our families put up with us sitting in front of flickering computer screens into the late hours of the night. And last but not least, there's our coach, Renee DeBuigne, who teaches pre-calculus and computer science at Richland High School.

Daniel Scott - our fearless team leader, Dan loves candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach...oh wait. Sorry. I forgot which "about Dan" I was writing. Dan is responsible for the testing and leading and technical expertise and stuff. He also did much of the writing, as well as remedial HTML and the nifty CGI script in the comments page. Dan worked at Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratories until May of this year doing grunt computer work for the Atmospheric Sciences group. He is going to Washington State University this fall and plans to major in Computer Science.

Chana Hickey - the member of the group who doesn't get enough credit for everything she does. She provided all the sugar needed for the long hours needed to produce this site.

Geoffrey Elliott - Geoffrey is the person behind most of what you see here. He was in charge of most of the actual HTML coding, and created the buttons, bars and backgrounds in Photoshop. A graduate of Richland High School, Geoffrey works at Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and works on web pages for the new Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, currently under construction in Richland. He enjoys fooling around on computers, and plans to attend the University of Washington this fall, to study medicine or computer science.

Last Updated August 22, 1996