Portland State Magazine Winter 2013

10 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE WINTER 2013 Travis Knight ’98 leads the enchantment at Laika animation studio. STOP-MOTI ON MAGIC written by JOHN KIRKLAND A LONG DAY at Laika lasts about four seconds. That is, four seconds of a silicon puppet doing something— kicking a ball, opening a school locker or running from an evil ghost. Those four seconds might take a 14-hour workday and will enlist the talents of animators, sculptors, set designers, and photographers. This is the world of stop-motion animation, and Laika, headquartered in Hillsboro, is one of the top studios in the world doing this work. ParaNorman , which opened last summer, has earned an Academy Award nomination just as Coraline did in 2010. The company’s CEO is Travis Knight, a 1998 graduate of Portland State who was honored in October with a PSU Alumni Achievement Award. He divides his time between the heavy business decisions of overseeing a 700-employee studio, and doing what he really loves: playing with puppets. The puppets in Laika movies are about nine inches tall, made of flexible molded silicon wrapped around a steel skeleton. Everything about them can be shaped and moved in tiny increments. The job of animators such as Knight is to inject personality into these movements. If he wants to show the hero of ParaNorman brushing his teeth, the animator will spend an entire day having the character squeeze toothpaste onto a brush, raise it to his mouth, do all the little motions of brushing, and generate a mouthful of white froth. After each movement, a camera takes a shot. Twenty-four shots make a second. ParaNorman is 5,520 seconds long. You do the math. “It’s ridiculous,” says Knight. Ridiculous in a cool way, because Knight can’t imagine doing anything else. “Ultimately the films we make are really labors of love. You can see it as you walk around this building. There are not very many people on the planet who have the patience or the skill or the intense focus to do this labor-intensive, mentally taxing kind of work.” Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to make these movies with computer animation? Knight says no, stop-motion is actually less expensive and requires a lot fewer people. But that’s not the point. Stop-motion, because of its hands-on WINTER 2013