In March 2002, I was asked to lead the Thank You Annabeth campaign to thank Annabeth Gish for her time with The X Files, in the lead up to the end of the show in May. This fan-run program - one of a number of programs thanking the cast and crew - raised funding for a full-page thank you ad in The Hollywood Reporter and also raised over US$2,000 for Annabeth's favourite charity, the Children's Hospital of New Mexico. All told, the various thank you projects raised in excess of US$20,000 for charitable purposes.

This was the ad I designed which appeared in The Hollywood Reporter in the commemorative May 10 edition. I was restricted to publicity images originating from Ten-Thirteen Productions due to time constraints - it was not possible so late in the piece to get consents from other copyright holders. In any case, since the object was to thank Annabeth for her time as Reyes, it made sense to create a tribute to her in character as Reyes.

Creating a digital artwork of this kind for publication is not an easy task on domestic equipment. This ad was created at 300dpi with dimensions of 2244 x 3035 pixels. It was created in twenty-two layers on a domestic laptop with a horrendously small 64MB of RAM, and every change, every movement, every filter took upwards of five minutes to process. It was tedious and laborious work. I also had very few shots of a suitable size to work with - FOX's media center FOX Flash was slow to process my request for access, so in the end, I had to work with what I could gather myself. You will note on close inspection that the top center and bottom right images have a grunge effect - this is to conceal bad lighting and consistency problems arising from low-resolution images. I was scraping the bottom of the barrel at that point. The three main images marking a diagonal path from the top left to the bottom right are all from the same promotional photo shoot (the smaller two are in fact rare outtakes that were never officially used) and they are intended to lead the eye through the image. It worked out well, despite the difficulties involved.

The advertisement received considerable critical acclaim from within the entertainment industry. We were also given a lovely gesture of recognition by THR - the coveted inside back cover. Normally, a substantial loading is charged for this position, but they liked our ad and granted it as an editorial decision. We were also the only fan-run project granted permission to use the X Files logo.