Travis Knight Quotes

I think of Ray Harryhausen's work - I knew his name before I knew any actor or director's names. His films had an impact on me very early on, probably even more than Disney. I think that's what made me interested in animation: His work.

I was influenced by Ray Harryhausen and Lotte Reiniger, with her twitchy, cutout animation, which I happened to see at a very young age, but also by the Warner Bros. cartoons, 'Tom and Jerry,' and of course Disney. And also by Fellini's 'Giulietta of the Spirits' and Kurosawa's 'Ran.' And by other American illustrators and painters.

I grew up as a little 4- and 5-year-old kid, watching Phil Tippett and my dad make monsters in our garage. That's what I did, as a child.

I used to send away for eight-minute Super 8 movies of various Ray Harryhausen scenes advertised on the back of 'Famous Monsters of Filmland' magazine.

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.

As a kid, I sat transfixed watching Ray Harryhausen's '7th Voyage of Sinbad.'

We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

I'm always there at home thinking of Wallace and Gromit ideas.

I started to do stop-motion when I was a kid. You take a Super 8 and make some models, and move, click, move, click. All that. I love all forms of animation, but there is something unique and special to stop-motion: it's more real and the set is lit like a set. But I think it's also a kind of lonely and dark thing to want to do.

I loved to watch cartoons and even made little stop-motion films in the backyard. At the time, I never really thought that it was something you could do for a living; it never actually hit me that people do that sort of thing or I would be capable of it.

When we started on 'Coraline,' there was a whole host of things that we had no idea how we were going to do. Because we were making films in a way that had never really been done before, we were taking this hundred-year-old art form and bringing it into a new era by embracing technology and innovation.

Working with a green screen is easy. It's just like being a kid. But it's not nearly as satisfying.

I think some of the special effects in Close Encounters hold up better than the new more expensive special effects is because they were better actually.

Whether it's the experiments on 'MythBusters' or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I've regularly had to do things that were never done before, from designing complex motion-control rigs to figuring out how to animate chocolate.

My father was a low-budget monster movie maker, so he made classics like 'The Crater Lake Monster.' There were always creatures around. And my dad was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen. One of our neighbors, who went on to win several Academy Awards, was close friends with my dad. His name is Phil Tippett.

Very early on, I was writing stories, and I was amazed at Spielberg's movies when I was young. Coming from the countryside, I was so impressed with the way he was able to tell stories and the way he was able to deal with le merveilleux - the wonders. Very quickly, he became for me a massive hero, and he introduced me to the world of a director.

I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.

I grew up watching movies and being amazed at the animatronics you'd see in stuff like 'The Dark Crystal,' and all those kinds of movies. So, I'm always enthralled with how they can make it all work, behind the scenes, with the visual effects.

I have always thought of Walt Disney as my second father.

When I was a child, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I loved monster movies and sci-fi, and then 'Star Wars' came out, and I was completely out of my mind with that, with 'Close Encounters,' and then I thought maybe I was going to go into special effects makeup, which I thought was awesome.

Truthfully, I don't know how those special effects people do it.

Working for Disney for the last eight and a half years, people come and go - production staff and actors. I stepped onto the sound stage and it was a literal time warp.

Ray Harryhausen's 'Sinbad' picture was the first film I remember seeing. I was two years old when it came out, and it changed my life forever. I had nightmares about dragons and stuff for years - and loved it!

I feel I'm just meant to do stop-motion. Live-action is much more glamorous to some, but it's basically a whole army of people focused on one thing.

What we were in on, really, was the invention of animation.