Season 4 Site Design and
how it came to be.
Comments by Michael Conomy
AKA [Team Discoveror]
Note:
This will not effect you, if you have not read any of the
episodes, as it is mainly about the development of how I
decided on the design from the season 4 site design,
A lot of you of
you that actually read Star Trek Dragon are probably thinking
where the hell did this Mike Conomy or Team Discoveror come
from and how the did he happen to get involved with the season
4 of this online Star Trek Series.
Some of you may know of me from MP [Millennium Pictures] or
MCGI, both, which I am a major player. Well I wasn't always.
Back in the year 1999 I was a nothing, knew pretty much
nothing about fan fiction CGI or anything else that involved
actually doing creative stuff on the computer. But I could fix
a computer with my eyes closed and really enjoyed Star Trek
and any Science Fiction.
Late 99 I picked up a copy of some dinky html program and
tried to turn the idea I had for a show called Star Trek
Discoveror, that never happened later on I got a copy of
FrontPage 2000 and Photoshop 6 and it all started from there
over the next year and a half I developed my design talent in
both CGI [through 3D Studio Max] and HTML by doing work
for other people. I must of done close to 100 sites, including
things that were never finished.
Now that brings us to somewhere in the beginning of 2001 I had
given up on trying to create my own fan fiction series. Not
due to my lack of talent as a web designer of 3D Artist but as
a Writer. During this time I decided to work on a few other
projects, such as the Star Trek Monet site and Star Trek
Khitomer and others. But these were just one off thing. As one
of these jobs was to be the new site for Star Trek Dragon,
coming into its 4 season later on in the year. I really didn't
think much of it as first; to me it was just another site
design to improve my skills.
So I put forward a design to Jon, after he had asked if I was
interested in working on the site, Jon was more then happy
with it and so was I at that time. But the new season was
still months of and I didn't have to do anything with the
site.
Jon comes back to me a few months later and asked me how the
new site was going; I said I hadn't really touched it since
those early days. So I set out to start finishing it but after
a while I noticed that I had developed my skills a lot more
since then and the site was no longer up to my standards. So I
started from scratch. I think it was after I showed Jon the
newer site, he either asked me or I asked him if he would like
me to be the Webmaster for the next season of Dragon. I
thought about it for a few seconds. It would allow me to do
the parts of a show i enjoyed with out having to actually
write it, so I took the job and started to build the new
episode banners [Which are on the site today] and the
Character pictures, and as this was my first time doing actual
character manipulations with actual actors heads I didn't know
how well it would turn out. As it turned out they weren't so
bad, Justin Shalk, writer of Star Trek Phantom and a Webmaster
at MP with said and I quote "I haven't seen manipulations
that good since paris2".
Then I did it again, I got involved with other projects my
skills developed more and Jon came to me and asked how far I
had got. I said not much further then I had shown you before.
So I sat down to finish the site and then all of a sudden I
noticed the site was a piece of junk compared to what I could
do now. I thought to my self I have to stop doing this or
otherwise I will never finish the site. So I started looking
around the net for a site that would push my talent to
recreate the look of. This site was Deep Angel, an online
Series that was also creating its own game. I had been to that
site about 50 million times but never knew how to work out the
design to work until a friend of mine Pete Tzinski asked me to
try and show him how to pull of the design for a design he
wanted. So I sat there for a few hours and worked it out, I
then showed Pete how to do it but he was still a decent way
behind me in knowing to do certain things in HTML and in
Photoshop.
I ended up taking the things I had just learnt and made the
Star Trek Dragon site you see to day, it is a site I am still
happy with even 3 months after I finished it, and I have done
no other sites that out do it in HTML coding since then. Also
since there are no frames, its all in tables, I had to spend
many hours placing tables inside tables and also placing links
on almost every page.
Jon has asked me once or twice weather I would be willing to
stay on for a season 5 if he decides to go into Dragons 5
season. My response at this moment is, HOW THE HELL DO I TOP
THIS !!!.
laterz
TD
Note: You
can contact me about any of the graphics or HTML workings at
td@mcgi.com |