DDC 26: The Ball Journey

A 32.5 second 3D loop: one ball rolls through nine tactile rooms in red, green, blue and gold, and lands exactly where it began.

Client: dEX Ghana
Year: 2026
Role: Concept, storyboard, 3D animation, look development, sound and edit
Tools

Overview

The Ball Journey is a 32.5 second 3D film for DDC26, the dEX Design Conference 2026 in Accra. One ball rolls, drops and bounces through nine rooms, changing from red to green to blue on the way, and finishes on the frame it started from so the film loops without a seam.

The challenge

Nine sets in 32 seconds leaves about three and a half seconds per room. Each room had to read at a glance, hand the ball to the next with a clear physical cause, and still belong to one consistent, touchable world.

Approach

The film is mapped as 26 timed beats across nine scenes. Each beat has its own storyboard panel with the camera move drawn on it.
The palette stays tight: red, green, blue and gold over warm bone and plaster. Materials are toy-like on purpose, ribbed rubber, felt, lacquered wood, clay, ceramic and corrugated card, so every contact has a texture you can almost hear.
I built and animated the sets in Blender and scripted the repetitive pieces, like the ring floors, tile ripples and ribbon tubes, in Python so I could change a layout without remodeling it.
The sound plan is dry foley: wood, plastic, rubber, cardboard, ceramic and metal hits with real silence between them. In the last beat the panels slide apart into the opening frame, which closes the loop.

The film