‘Tetris’ Film’s Retro 8-Bit Look Defies Technology ‘Making Everything Beautiful’

Earlier this year, Apple released an enthralling teaser in the build-up to the release of Tetris the movie, which first hit Apple TV+ on March 31, 2023. Now, Coffee & TV, the studio behind the film’s 8-bit style animation, is revealing how it was made.

Seeing as salesman Henk Rogers first developed the game in 1988, the motion design featured in the film offers a “blocky,” 8-Bit pixel-style art form typically found in retro video games from the era.

Coffee & TV senior motion designer Danny Boyle explained that the studio was commissioned to create a variety of functional graphics and animation assets, including vignettes, title and scene establishers, or even maps to support the story.

However, after experimenting with ideas, the team soon found that coming up with the pixelated, lo-fi look it envisioned with 4K cinema technology wasn’t all that simple. 

At first, the designers tried forming the graphics at 4K before using a separate tool to pixelize the elements. When this didn’t work due to the lack of control over “every single pixel,” the creatives decided to just create entire designs at scale.

This resulted in an estimated scale of 1:10, where each artwork was required to be 400 pixels wide. These drawings were sketched on “tiny canvases” in several applications to turn them into the “old school interface” the team was looking for.

Additionally, Boyle revealed that the artists on the project took on the separate task of ensuring the animations came across as pixelated too. As such, each animated image was moved in a blocky manner so that it only shifted 10 pixels at a time.

Interestingly, the motion designer described the entire process as bucking the trend of technology “trying to make everything beautiful” with its smooth lines and gradients. Instead, the purpose of the entire film was to spotlight the exact opposite.

Intrigued by the design process behind the film? Check out the movie trailer below and catch the full showing on Apple TV+.

[via Design Week and Coffee & TV, images via Coffee & TV]