Pivotal role: a house elf in the latest Harry Potter film is one of a group of digital characters who play increasingly important parts in movies.

And the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor goes to ... Dobby, the House Elf?

It might sound far-fetched to some. But considering the role this 3D character played in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the day when CG characters compete against live actors for excellence in filmmaking achievement may be closer than you think.

"Dobby is a special character," says Doug Smythe, associate visual effects supervisor at ILM, the facility responsible for his creation. "He's special not so much because of his screen time, which was 75 shots, or 10 to 12 minutes of animation. It's more the role he plays. It's pivotal. He knows why Harry Potter must leave the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It's an important part of the story."

"The biggest innovation in this project is that Dobby's like a real actor," adds Dave Andrews, animation director. "He's photoreal, he's acting alongside Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, and he exhibits the subtlety of a real actor. He's the new bar at ILM against which future characters will be compared."

Building a Believable Actor

Creating such a character required the use of powerful commercial and proprietary software, some of it written or enhanced specifically for the film.

Digital Dobby began life as a dense point cloud of data, explains Symthe. "Gentle Giant Studios cyberscanned a maquette of Dobby, and we used in-house surfacing tools, plus Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator and in-house sculpting software, to shape the data into the form we needed."