Laguna High to Put Its ’99 Yearbook on CD-ROM

Laguna Beach High School appears to be the first in Orange County to go with a high-tech version of alumni memories, offering students a yearbook on CD-ROM this year.

In a few years, when today’s Laguna Beach seniors go for a stroll down memory lane, they will have the option of turning the pages of a traditional paper yearbook or clicking on an icon.

The disc, which will include video footage of football games, high school plays and even the prom and graduation, will be offered for $30, some $20 less than the traditional book.

“We’re very excited about it,” said yearbook advisor Pam MacKay, “but we see it as a complement to the existing yearbook. I don’t think that will ever go away because the kids like to have them for signatures.”

Laguna Beach High joins a spate of other schools throughout the nation that have been selling the digital yearbooks, often produced by outside outfits that aggressively push the new technology to schools. In the case of Laguna Beach, an Aliso Viejo company is offering to put the CD-ROM together at what it says is a loss, in order to produce a prototype it can market to other Orange County high schools that have been saying they want to see the product before they make a commitment.

“What we’re trying to do is create something that’s going to be phenomenal so they’ll want to do it next year but also so we have something to show potential clients and customers,” said Glen Boyer, president of Advanced Systems Inc.

Throughout the school year, Advanced Systems staffers have attended Laguna Beach High School sporting events, dances, plays and activities, videotaping them with digital cameras, Boyer said.

The company will use its videotape as well as the yearbook club’s photos and information in the final product.

“We take their existing images gathered and create a virtual environment that has animation, 3-D virtual rooms and uses Hollywood blue screen techniques,” Boyer said.

For example, seniors photographed against a blue screen will have their images used on the disc in place of traditional icons. The students will welcome viewers to Laguna Beach High and invite people to enter, say, the “varsity sports room.”

The disc also will have a time capsule component, with the top songs of the year, favorite movies, most important news events and scientific achievements, Boyer said.

Officials at the nonprofit National Scholastic Press Assn. at the University of Minnesota estimate CD-ROM yearbooks are offered at a few hundred of the nation’s 30,000 high schools. They are most popular in affluent suburbs where schools have the technology and families are more likely to be equipped to run them at home.

They are enough of a trend, however, that the press association, which runs national contests for student newspapers and yearbooks, is holding its first CD-ROM yearbook contest this year.

The Laguna Beach CD-ROMs will sell for $30 each until May 15. After that the price will rise to $35, with any profit going to the cheerleading squad, for which MacKay is also the advisor. MacKay said the school anticipates selling about 100 of the discs. The $3,000 or so in sales does not cover Advanced System’s costs in videotaping, editing and pressing the discs.

But next year, the company hopes students will sign up to purchase the CD-ROMs at the beginning of the year, when they buy traditional yearbooks. The price will be $30 to $35 per disc, Boyer said.

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Thousand Oaks and Adolfo Camarillo high schools in Ventura County are trying out CD-ROM yearbooks this year, although the process differs from the one in Laguna Beach.

YearDisc, the Thousand Oaks company putting together those digital yearbooks, sells its software to a school for $2,500. The upfront fee covers the pressing costs of the first 100 discs.

YearDisc also puts a computer in the school and students learn how to put together a CD-ROM themselves, President Barry Peters said.

Advanced Systems and YearDisc each return a portion of the profits to the school.

“That way it becomes a fund-raiser for the school,” Peters said. He anticipates that the trend in digital yearbooks will hit its stride with the new millennium. “We’re really looking for year 2000 to be a huge year for us.”