Breathing life into dragons

Once Rollins determined how the dragon should move, he ran animation tests, trying out different versions of the same scene. "Where the dragon crawls across the rocks, we'd do one version with it using its hind legs, another where it's crouched down, using the batlike hands on its wings to crawl," Alexander explains.

Finally, after three to five months of preparation, the dragon had texture and color and was moving well. It was ready to start "shot production." This is when the dragon is manipulated into film scenes, "acting" alongside the real actors - in this case Harry, who was trying to accomplish a tournament task.

"The shot production went on for another nine months," Alexander says. The whole process involved at least 50 people for more than a year.

Out of all the things the dragon had to do, breathing fire was one of the toughest to re-create.

"Fire is a natural occurrence, everyone knows what it looks like. They know if it looks fake," Alexander says. "We needed [the dragon's] fire to be directable, and that took a long time."

In the end, they mixed footage of real fire with high-tech computer effects. The result is a believable, ferocious, fire-breathing dragon.

Animation is difficult, Alexander says. If the movement doesn't look right, the scene is ruined. "It is difficult to do animation and not make it look weird," he says. But this dragon turned out even better than he had expected.

Not all the dragon scenes in "Goblet of Fire" are computer-animated. Although the digital dragon is in more than 140 scenes, a large puppet dragon appears twice, in the first dragon sequence when Harry is in the forest. See if you can tell the difference.

Dragons haven't always looked as lifelike as the Horntail in "Goblet of Fire." Long before high-tech computer animation, special effects involved hand-drawn animation and stop-motion shooting, which meant piecing each frame or pose together to form movement. Here are how some famous dragons came to life in movies from the past.

Sleeping Beauty (1959) The dragon in this Disney animation was hand-painted and designed by Eyvind Earle. At the time, his approach was viewed as bold and unique. The movie was made using a stop-motion camera, with each frame photographed three times (once with a red filter, once with a blue filter, and once with a green filter). The negative was then printed onto film. A flame thrower was recorded to create the sound effects of the dragon's breath.

Dragonslayer (1981) Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) worked on this Paramount picture. Back then, filmmakers used a mechanical dragon, a model that was hooked up to a computer. The dragon's movements were programmed in. During filming, the computer moved the dragon and this caused "motion blur," making the dragon's actions look more realistic. ILM called this approach "go-motion." In stop-motion, a model is moved once per frame, creating jerky movement. Using go-motion, the dragon moved a few times per frame.

The Neverending Story (1984) The dragon in this movie by Warner Bros. looked more like a big white fluffy dog with feathers. It was a model produced by Jim Henson Creatures, of the Muppets fame. It operated like a mechanical puppet. This was a popular form of animation before digital effects really took off.

Dragonheart (1996) It took a team of 96 people at ILM to create Draco, the first dragon to be made using computer graphic imagery (CGI). On screen, this digital dragon was 18 feet high, 43 feet long, and had the voice of actor Sean Connery. The only part of the dragon that wasn't computer-animated was its tongue. One scene takes place in the dragon's mouth. To create a cavelike mouth, ILM made a full-sized mechanical tongue and jaw that could be moved by machines. Actors stood in the mechanical mouth to film the scene. The rest of dragon was added to the scene later using computer animation.

Sources: www.imdb.com, www.harrypotter.warnerbros.com

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