CALIBRATION
A personal project about burnout and finding the long way back to creativity and the happiness of creating.
Design & Animation / Dominic Plaza
Sound Design / Decelerate
Thirty days, one animation a day. Just a gray cube rolling and bouncing on a flat floor — no lighting, no material, nothing fancy. Wasn't trying to make anything profound. Just needed something small to do every day that would get me back to actually creating and sharpening my skills.
Around the same time, I was studying design principles, mostly to put a name to instincts I already had. At some point, the two just merged — I started using what I was learning to art-direct the exercise, and a story I hadn't meant to tell started showing up in the footage.
The piece moved through three rooms.
Isolation — pale, quiet, almost too bright to hide in. The cube is small, alone, barely present
Release — red, close, everything turned up. The cube multiplying, scattering- too much at once.
Calibration — the return. Not to something new, but to what was there the whole time.
The object's color never actually changes hue through any of this — same blue the whole way —, but it goes muted, almost black, as things get worse, and only comes back fully once the room around it goes neutral and quiet.
Somewhere in there the cube becomes a sphere. Same material, just lighter.
Easier to carry, easier to roll.
Calibration, to me, just means cutting away what was never actually necessary. What's left after that is you — in your own color, finally clear.
PROCESS
Early styleframes
This is where I first saw it — the emissive backgrounds, the moody vibe — and felt the story was already there.
I tested far more directions than the piece needed — navy and gold, terracotta, deep green — before realizing two colors, used with restraint, said more than seven ever could.
Color palette exploration
Built it red-first, then reconsidered starting with blue. Turned out to be a story problem, not a color one: isolation and release aren't two separate states; they're two phases of the same one.
Finding the order
SOUND DESIGN
