how to create 8bit pixel style (80s)

[Walter Soyka]

[Jacqueline Bauer] “Is it possible to create 8bit pixel animation like https://vimeo.com/channels/pixel/page:1 from pictures / photos? Is there a plug-in for AE available?”

VFX artists think backwards. What characterizes the 8-bit look? Low resolution, a small color palette, no anti-aliasing, and maybe a lower frame rate? So how do you get each of those looks? A couple suggestions:

Low resolution: work in a low-res comp, then pre-comp it, scale it up, and render in Draft mode instead of Best Settings

Small color palette: Posterize effect, perhaps Colorama effect

No anti-aliasing: This should come automatically by reducing the resolution and palette

In practice, though, it’ll be difficult to get the old 8-bit video games look as a final pass over a completed piece. Old video games didn’t use converted photos and videos; they were actually drawn a pixel at a time in the limited palette available.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[John Cuevas]

If you use coloramma, turn off “interpolate pallette”, tanken together with Walter’s suggestions should get you pretty close.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

Been playing with this a little bit. I took a picture into photo shop. Went into Image> Modes> Indexed Color and chose Uniform, Color = 8 and I changed the amount to 50%. Seems to give a pretty good look of 80’s color. Add some distortion/degradation in AE and you should be good to go.

For the aliasing, I just added a mosiac effect and divided the size of the image by 4—looked like an 80’s video game to me and my co-workers.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[Jacqueline Bauer]

Wow, thank you so much.
Works well. But yes for sure … it´s better to paint in the pixel style from the beginning, but it is close to that – what I want to do.

Thx to ALL.

[Nathaniel Akin]

Seeing my name pop up here has inspired me to de-lurk and finally sign up for an account. Glad to see you found some suggestions that work for you, another thing to consider if you have control over the shooting of the source images is to shoot high contrast so that when you reduce color you get cleaner delineation at the low res.

Hand drawing is the best way to get a ‘true’ video game look, but I understand if you don’t want to do that. If you do it’s best to think in terms of sprites and loops. When we did the Bell pixel campaign we sometimes would redraw props or backgrounds on top of photo reference, but change light source and proportions to work better at low res. We’d minimize the number of poses and re-drawing, just like they used to when making 80’s video game sprites.

Another trick we used that might work for your effect is to superimpose a light grid at high resolution over the top of the scaled up low res pixels which made it look a bit more like you could see the individual pixels separated – you can see that effect here: https://filmblender.com/view/technique/pixel

Even though hand drawing the pixel art can be laborious it can be quite rewarding. If I get the chance I may post a tutorial with some of the things I learned doing that work, glad to see other people are enjoying that style as well, good luck!

-N.