Mission Joy is a positive documentary about the friendship of 2 luminaries, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. They both happen to have incredibly distinct laughs. I was tasked with making each letter of the title screen chortle along with those distinctive laughs.
This is one of the most granular animations that I’ve ever done. It’s only 7 seconds and 10 letters. I had to make those letters distinctive enough and fill them with enough personality to match a laugh. So I used the puppet tool to distort each individual letter in time with the audio waveform of each man’s laugh. “Joy,” goes up and out, while “Mission” is a bit subtler and doesn’t hit the same high frequency or volume. It was a challenge but I really loved doing it.
