I Try to Go There...

Bath time yields some intense self-discovery during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine. I lean into it.

**Official selection of the Spring 2020 COVID-19 International Film Festival**

This was my first time combining practical art textures and digital illustration techniques to tell a story, and I kind of had to invent my own pipeline. For this project, the backgrounds were created using ink washes and bath salt crystals. They were scanned and digitized so I could manipulate them around the the line work, which was done digitally in Procreate. I sat in my bathtub with my iPhone in “Voice Memo” mode to create the sound effects. A little bit of ambient noise from my neighbors and the traffic outside my apartment added an unexpected, but happy, layer of interest. Using Procreate’s animation assist function to draw movement and render video for each shot, I then imported each shot into Adobe Premiere Pro to edit as if it were traditional live-action footage captured with a camera. It’s a slightly clunky process, but one that is really aligned with the way my brain is wired, takes advantage of the tools I already have, and builds off of my professional experience. It has allowed me to experiment freely without needing to learn new, esoteric animation software. I have since tweaked a few things, but this process forms the basis for how I make all my 2D shorts.

2D Animated Short Film “I Try to Go There as Much as I Can; It’s Much Better That Way in the End”

Written, Directed, Performed, Animated and Edited by MJ Kuppinger

A Mystical Cartoonism Thingie, made in 2020