Actually, that's as good as I could expect, given the restraints that I was under. I didn't want to reshoot the video because I could've done better in a take 2 or 3. The idea with the video was to show a few techniques on some easy subject that anyone could handle. An experimental canvas of sorts, rather than a highly figurative subject needy of a lot of construction and refinement. I'm saving that for another video. Not sure how I'll be able to keep that one as short though. I can spend a lot of time on refinement and revisits and it makes the video boring uninformative easily. Sometimes I spend an hour just moving eyes, lips or fingers around...
Somehow I always fail to pay attention to relations of forms and line flow when I pixel. It somehow puts me in a different mode then when I paint. Normally I sketch, draw and/or paint
large, then scale down and make pixel-clarity adjustments until I feel that I'm getting diminishing returns. Throwing in chunks of dither there and there is a nice way to vary the texture
Anyways, I can't say that the dither bothers me too much in this case. I think the cold/warm interlace in the dither creates an interesting duality and color dimension. It's one of the strengths of dither that I perhaps forgot to mention. When painting, you can do a similar thing using fine grain textures with warm overlaying cold or something like that.
The hard light/shadow adjacency and lack of volume suggesting... global structural coherence bothers me far more, but not enough to warrant making it a 3 part video. I felt I had grazed off what I wanted.
Of course, if you have rotation in the game engine, dithering might cause an annoying flickering effect, so I wouldn't use it on game characters as much. It could look neat spicing up the rusty parts of vehicles though. Brown over gray.