Travis Knight Quotes

I think stop-motion has always been semi-obsolete. And stop-motion animators - people like myself - love it so much that we're always going to be looking for new ways to make our films.

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.

You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.

Stop-motion is sort of twitchy; you can feel the life in it. If we were to remove that completely, there'd be no point in it.

You just can't make any movie and it will be good now. This is a really a difficult time to be in films.

Making movies is a hard thing, and it's slow. So you can glorify the product, but the process is difficult no matter who you are.

People don't talk about how hard it is to make a movie. Nobody does. Ever.

We use technology in service of the art, as a storytelling tool - and if we want to do something that's never been done we have to invent the technology. 'ParaNorman' represents the realization of stop-motion's potential.

Historically, for a stop-motion film, you gathered the crew together, you made the movie, and then everyone ran screaming to the next project.

Typically, with low-budget stop-motion, you can get away with a cartoony style.

Stop-motion is sort of the redheaded stepchild of animation. But it's incredibly beautiful.

Make movies you love because it's miserable. Every movie I've worked on at one point or another is exhausting, and you feel like you're making a bad movie.

I've always loved stop motion animation and I particularly wanted to do stop motion with puppets that have fur, for whatever reason that is.

When you're dealing with clay animation, people forget that every single set is built to scale and by hand.

I love the culture of animation. What stop-motion has in common with live-action is that it has many of the same departments. There's hair, costume, makeup in the form of paint, gaffers, electricians. So there's the same sense of real stuff, real light. But it's not like everything happens at once, like it does in live-action. It's all subdivided into these small sets. It's where my strengths are. Live-action is just an utterly different world, and I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.

Let's just say it was damn hard [to make the Hangover]. I've got the bumps and bruises to show for it. It's funny because things that don't even look that bad on screen were still extremely painful.

It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.

Hollywood is a deeply odd place. There are so many factors that have to go perfectly, so many schedules and visions that have to snap together for a film even to be made, much less be good.

I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.

Every movie has its complexities and its challenges.

When we were growing up and saw a Ray Harryhausen movie, we were interested in how it was done. But thank God we got to go through the magic of seeing it before we knew how it was done. You were able to get this beautiful, pure, visceral response to something without knowing too much about it.

I knew that there was an upcoming screening where not only were we going to show it to everybody else at the studio, we also needed to move into production... And yet I was sitting there in editorial going this is not working. I'm a failure.

Trying to film a movie on a diet is hard enough, I can't imagine how it would be on drugs.

I've loved Kevin McDonald's movies for a while and it was an amazing experience because he really wanted to do something different. It was by far one of the hardest things I've ever done, to wake up every single day and know that you're going to be freezing cold and wet, every single day, 10 times a day, and there's no getting away from it.

Never in my career have I got the support for what I'm doing, any more than I have on Fringe.