After Effect technique

[Max Haller]

At first glance I feel like its a mixture of luma matting and it kind of looks like a mosaic with CC kernel applied to make that grid. I’m not really sure how to get the boxes smaller in the lighter areas, but maybe that’ll help you get started. CC kernel seems kind of arcane imo but if you play with the sliders you should be able to get a similar effect to find edges in PS.

Maybe that combined with another duped footage layer that you could color correct to get the shadows how you want them for the matte.

[Eric Santiago]

so reminiscent of a shader in Maya where the pixels get smaller depending on luminance and camera angle.
I wonder if there is a plug-in like that or expression?

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If you make a repeating pyramid height map and composite it in hard light blend mode with a grayscale image and then add a threshold, you should get something very close to that.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Andy Engelkemier]

I’d put my money on trapcode form and nothing more than that.

Most of their examples are always lights and flashy stuff, but you just choose a particle system, and how to control it. With form, it’s a grid, and you choose your footage to control color, and size of the square particles.

There are a few examples of this on their page. If you haven’t looked at their plugins, particular is probably their most popular since it’s the most customizable. I kind of wonder if you could do it with that. Probably…but form would be more efficient for sure. Particular wants to start from a single point, rather than a grid, even though grid is technically an option.

Anyway, it’s not cheap if you only use it once, so hopefully you use it a lot, or you’re getting paid a lot for this project.