MidnightDrgn: I loved the scene that depicts the two dragons in the mating flight... Lovely. How did you come up with the idea?
Dr. Hogarth: That's very similar to the mating flight of the American bald eagle. They go in for something very similar. I'm afraid we stole it from the eagle. Even for eagles — which don't breathe fire — it's pretty dramatic! It just seemed like something dragons might do.
fourmocav: Why do you think that dragons have enchanted society for thousands of years?
Dr. Hogarth: Quite a lot of reasons. The earliest dragons were a part of the myth of how we came into existence: God slays dragons and creates the earth and the sea. I think that's why they were fascinated by stories of these amazing, vast monsters. Then they took over a sense of how man slew dragons. St. George was the most famous, but there were hundreds of others. And people have always been interested in the world around them. They were just interested in stories about remarkable animals. It's a pity that dragons don't exist. But then elephants and giraffes are pretty exotic and interesting too, and they do exist. Dragons just make a good story.
Dragonbardd: Do you really think that the Loch Ness monster is a marine dragon?
Dr. Hogarth: Well it's got all the features of marine dragons, hasn't it? It looks like a marine dragon. The first appearance involved the intervention of a Saint — Saint Colombo, and that's one of the hallmarks of a dragon; being dealt with by a saint. Although it does live in fresh water, not the sea, but I think we can stretch the point there.
DragonLord: How many people worked on the realistic physiology of the dragons, and how did they make it seem like a real animal?
Dr. Hogarth: What happened was that we talked a lot about how the dragons' physiology might work, and the artist illustrated it, and a model was made in three dimensions, and then the computer graphics people made it move and do what it does on the screen. Quite a lot of people were involved on a lot of levels, but quite a lot of them I never met, as they were doing the clever computer stuff.
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