Polywood Dreams: How FersetID is Demaking CinemaMerging a subculture in gaming into a subculture in cinema.
If modern cinema is a 4K IMAX thrill ride, then the work of FersetID is the scratched-up bootleg PS1 CD passed around between your cousins. Not in quality — but in feeling. It’s that strange alchemy of lo-fi textures and deep emotion, of jagged nostalgia shaped into new meaning. And it’s all part of a rising subculture best understood through one retro-futurist act of rebellion: the demake.
Demaking is what happens when you don’t upscale, you downplay. You take Elden Ring and squeeze it into a Game Boy cartridge. You give Kratos a square jaw so large it could store a save file. And lately, you take classic films, from Spirited Away to Blade Runner, and run them through the PS1/N64 aesthetic like a faulty VHS that’s seen one too many school sleepovers.
It's more than a gimmick. It's a growing creative language. One where modders and artists alike use the visual grammar of retro games, low-res textures, polygonal characters and MIDI mood boards to say something new about stories we've heard a thousand times. It's meme and memory, glitch and homage. And no one is doing it quite like FersetID.
FersetID’s Films Feel Like Booting Up a Memory
A self-proclaimed “beginner” who didn’t touch Blender seriously until 2023, Colombian artist FersetID has quickly become one of the most distinctive voices in the low poly art scene. His work is what happens when cinema goes through puberty in a low poly graphics engine.
He began, humbly, by playing with memes, building short animations that mashed retro stylings with viral culture. But soon, the itch grew deeper: what if the polygonal nostalgia of gaming could be a vessel for cinematic reverence? What if you didn’t just demake games, you demade films?
From Whiplash to Home Alone, Paprika to The Matrix, FersetID recreates iconic scenes with glitchy shadows, blocky stares, and grainy Spanish subtitles. “I’m Colombian, and my native language is Spanish. In old video games, translations were mostly done through text and subtitles, keeping the original audio. When I recreate movies as if they were retro games, I’m simulating that feeling of having the game translated into Spanish,” says FersetID.
These aren’t pixel-perfect re-creations. They’re PS1-daydreams of the films he (and we) love, imagined not with a director’s polish but with a player’s passion.
And that’s the point. “I consider myself a beginner,” he told us, “because I didn’t formally learn animation techniques… Everything I know is self-taught.” This unpolished, intuitive approach bleeds into the work. The camera lingers too long. The lighting flickers. The audio crackles. But this roughness is what makes the work feel.
Where Meme Meets Museum
There's something undeniably funny about a squashed looking J.K. Simmons yelling at you from a N64-style drum kit. But there’s also something poignant. These low poly remakes live in the uncanny valley between comedy and craft, where Fight Club becomes fan art and Akira gains a glitchy tenderness.
Cinematic demakes straddle an unusual space: too sincere to be parodies, too playful to be museum pieces. FersetID asks the question: What if Clockwork Orange was an RPG cutscene? What if Spirited Away was playable on a battered disc found in a Colombian secondhand market stall?
And in doing so, they don’t just remix culture, they revive it. Films that might feel dusty to Gen Z become fresh when re-rendered as playable memories. Akira becomes something you want to click. Blade Runner gets the start screen it never had.
Demaking the Future
Demakes are not just an act of nostalgia, they’re a creative constraint that births new ideas. And as FersetID pushes further into indie games and short films he’s carving a new path forward for low poly machinima.
In an age of AI photorealism and infinite GPU render farms, the handmade blockiness of demake art feels almost rebellious. It reminds us that imagination doesn't need 8K photo realism — just a good scene, some Blender hacks, and a deep love for the story.
So, what comes next? More artists may follow in FersetID’s footsteps, applying retro gaming logic to other cultural icons: reality TV, fashion campaigns (see Mowalola), or even music videos (see VinceJG). The demake is becoming a style, not just a subgenre, one that trades gloss for grit, resolution for resonance.
Because sometimes, when everything in this world charades as being real, it’s the blatantly fake stuff that hits hardest.
Words by James Davis
