Getting 'Coraline' moving

Stop-motion animator Travis Knight, the son of Nike co-founder and billionaire Phil Knight, hasn't exactly followed in his father's sneaker prints. "I was athletic growing up and that was, of course, a big part of my household, but it wasn't something that I was necessarily passionate about," Knight says. "I understand the passion that [my father] feels for sports and athletics because I feel the same way about animation and film."

Knight first discovered stop-motion through classic Rankin/Bass holiday specials like 1964's "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." After college, he worked his way up to an animator job at Will Vinton Studios (now Laika), which was gearing up to produce the clay-animated TV series "The P.J.s" and "Gary & Mike." After those shows went off the air, Knight spent the next six years using a combination of stop-motion and CGI to animate short films, music videos and commercials for "all kinds of crazy products like teriyaki sauce and toilet bowl cleaners," he says.

When writer-director Henry Selick joined Laika in 2004, he brought "Coraline," an adaptation of fantasy author Neil Gaiman's children's story, with him. Knight has spent the last 2 1/2 years as one of the lead stop-motion animators on the project.

"It kind of hurts my stomach when I think about it but, on a good day, you'll maybe get two or three seconds of finished animation," he says. "Every little bit of life that you see on screen is life that's been sucked out of an animator. And you can guarantee that if a shot is really great, if it really sings, that underneath a desk somewhere is an animator huddled in a fetal position, weeping."

Strike a pose: In the early stages of pre-production, Knight was responsible for putting the armatures -- the puppets' underlying ball-and-socket frameworks -- through a rigorous testing process. "As soon as a new puppet would come online, we would test those things out and make sure they could do what they need to do, because the armatures need to be durable, sturdy," he says. "They need to be strong because they have to hold these extreme positions over hours and even days, and they have to be stable. But at the same time, they've got to be flexible and pliable enough so you can actually get a performance out of them. So it's a really crucial part, making sure the armatures work properly."