[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.