CALIBRATION
Design & Animation / Dominic Plaza
Sound Design / Decelerate
A personal project about burnout and finding the long way back to creativity and the happiness of creating.
Thirty days, one animation a day. A gray cube, no lighting, no material — just rolling, bouncing, rotating on a flat floor. I started it while I was feeling burned out — not to make anything meaningful, just a small daily habit, a way of trying to find my way back to creativity.
I'd been studying design principles around the same time, mostly as a way to formalize instincts I already had. It felt right to let the two things meet: use what I was learning to art-direct the exercise into something that told the story the raw footage already had in it.
The piece moved through three rooms.
Isolation — pale, quiet, almost too bright to hide in. The cube is small, alone, barely present
Emergency — 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.
Through the piece, the object never changes color — a blue that goes muted, almost black. By the end, the room around it goes almost entirely neutral — stripped of everything except what actually matters. Somewhere along the way, the cube becomes a sphere: the same material, just lighter. Easier to carry. Easier to roll.
Calibration isn't a reset. It isn't becoming someone else. It's removing what was never necessary until what's left is just — you, in your own color, clearly.
PROCESS
Early styleframes
Color palette exploration
Finding the order
