Slashdot Mirror
Online Epic to Release Penultimate Episode
Brokensaint writes "The award-winning 3-year epic 'Broken Saints' is preparing to launch it's 23rd installment in its cult hit saga. Winner of the Sundance Online Film Festival Audience Award for Animation, 'Broken Saints' contains over 10 hours of original flash storytelling in 'cinematic literature' format (think animated comic). Having been seen by over 2 million people worldwide, this free web project will be launching the penultimate episode in the series next week, and will close out its run with a 1 hour finale in June.
'Broken Saints' follows the paths of four protagonists from different cultures that receive an ominous vision of the future - a vision that is somehow tied to the launching of a global telecommunications network. One of the main characters - the Muslim mercenary Oran - was created as a direct protest of the continued sanctions against the nation of Iraq. His role in the story chillingly mirrors the direction of current global events.
The 3-person team from North Vancouver, Canada hopes to release a tradition graphic novel and DVD box set of the series by Christmas 2003. They are also in talks with production companies ranging from HBO to the Sci-Fi Network to do a mini-series adaptation of the epic.
If you want to help the lads chip away at their mounting bandwidth bills, please consider dropping a dime in their kitty."
I love Broken Saints, it's one of the best WORKING examples of using the web to deliver dramatic media.
They're utterly deserving of whatever graphic Slashdot brings to the site.
However, I don't think "Penultimate Episode About to Be Release Soon, But Not Yet!" is "news", even in the Slashdot sense.
As a link, cool. The press-release feel of the post is kind of silly, though.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Seriously, that is the biggest description I've seen in the 5-6 years I've been reading slashdot. Reminds me about Katz; just keeps going, and going...
Speaking of The Man Everyone Loves to Hate, the King Of Pontification...where is the guy? We haven't heard a peep from him in ages(not that this is a bad thing, actually.)
Please help metamoderate.
If you want to help the lads chip away at their mounting bandwidth bills, please consider dropping a dime in their kitty.
:)
/humor
humor
Also, please consider helping by not posting a link to their site on Slashdot for crying out loud.
"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
This is very true, but on the other side of the coin I like a little dating. Carrie Fisher not wearing a bra (and to a lesser extent being coked off her ass) gives the geek of 2003 a better perspective of life in the 70s than any history book.
Holy shit, someone used the word "penultimate" properly! On
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Yuck. Ok, maybe I don't know how to control flash properly, but is it even possible to pause, or jump around, in a flash animation? If I'm going to be watching a half hour episode of a long series of animated featurettes, I want to be able to pause them when the phone rings. Or, missing that, I want to be able to quickly and easily jump around the animation with an easy to use slide bar (or some equivalent).
Expecting me to sit still for thirty minutes without these options is something that I'm not willing to tolerate for the sake of an anti-war cartoon series.
Now, short animations in flash are fine. Anything longer than five minutes really needs to make the transition out into another format. Give me mpeg, give me avi, give me divx, give me quicktime... give me ANYTHING that I can pause.
Does this bother anyone else? Am I missing an easy way to jump around in flash?
--
RumorsDaily
You said his name three times! Are you insane?
I'd sleep in aluminum body armor tonight if I were you.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
What part of "The 3-person team from North Vancouver, Canada" did you not read? Anime, in the terms commonly used by American fanboys, refers to Japanese Animation. This is hardly Japanese; hell, it's hardly even Anime-styled.
Perhaps slashdot should create a generic "animation" catagory so all you people who whine about anything that might be anime don't have to see stories like this.
Broken Saints is all fine and good, but when is the next episode of Ninjai coming out?
Actually, "animated comic" is a far more accurate description of Broken Saints (BS) than "cartoon". Cartoons usually have a lot more animation than BS does. Cartoons usually have spoken dialogue, not animated text balloons. I think you get the idea.
Have you watched/read any Broken Saints episodes? I'm not sure if "cinematic literature" or "animated comic" are the right terms for it either, but if you have seen any BS then you'd understand the grasping for terms. "Flash comic strip" is the best I can manage, but it's too web-specific and will not really apply when the series is transferred to DVD.
Since Brokensaint isn't a slashdot user, I guess the article author will remain anonymous. It's hard to tell whether their intentions were good or bad; I pulled down 131mb of zipped episodes (1-22, plus trailer) from http://bs.brokensaints.com/av/downloads/ just now, and so in a sense I guess that's a bit of bandwidth hurt.
It seems kind of odd that the second-to-last episode, and not any of the others (like, say, the first) would merit a Slashdotting, but really now is a good time since there's more to see--better late than never.
But if even nine other people do what I did then that's 1.31gigs of data transfer; someone's got to pay for that. With any luck there'll be a benevolent user somewhere among the mix who's willing to contribute. The benefits of willfully Slashdotting are thus mixed at best: greater exposure but probably a low click to pay ratio.
At any rate, the comic is good. Hooray for pseudo-animation.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Basing a story on "universal messages" is great if you want to create a saturday morning cartoon. Things like 'be nice to everyone' are great for carebears, but adults generally like fare with more texture.
Of course I'm sure that since 'Full Metal Jacket' is dated (the Vietnam War is long gone), its message about war is completely irrelevant.
Keep your platitudes to yourself.
In this case, this speaks more about the poster than about the artist.
I don't know if Oran was created as a "direct protest" (this thing has been running for about two years) or to exploit a great dramatic situation. To me, it seemed like the second case.
The artists are very much on the left, no doubt, but the characters are no simple strawmen for their political arguments.
I disagree with their political stance on Iraq, as with a lot of their politics in general (feels too Salon-ish for me), but Oran is one of my favorite characters. The Iraq situation provides him with a lot of background and a great hook to put him in the story, as compared to others whose plots feel more contrived.
Broken Saints is a drama with a political voice. You may or may not agree with it, but it's very well done. Like all political fictions, it manipulates its world to express a political message, to use it as an model of ideas.
Oran, like all other characters, "speaks" about the political argument idealized in the fictional world.
You may even agree with the argument within the context of the fictional world, but find there's no connection between the fictional world (and the argument) with reality.
Or you may not agree with the argument at all, but find the fictional world so well done it's deserving appreciation as fiction.
You don't have to fear Big Brother is about to take over the world to appreciate "1984", believe the banality of American consumerism is the end of civilization to like "Brave New World", or have an anachronistic appreciation for chivalric tradition to understand "Don Quixote".
Or, perhaps closer to the media, you don't have to believe the world is being taken over by the secret societies operating under the UN and corporations to bring a New World Order to think Deus Ex had a great plot.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Has anyone yet added these to a P2P net? Seems like an obvious relief on thier bandwith costs, paticularly as the site is not generating revenue through ads.
Steve Cline http://www.clines.org, http://www.objectbap.com
Animal Farm
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Oliver Twist
Yep... lousy storytelling, all of 'em.
Good storytelling has a good story. You're giving a personal requirement for "art" and claiming it as a universal prerequisite of a craft. Not to mention that a well told story, even one with a specific and timely political message, becomes an instantiation of a universal. It's not necessarily the message that makes a classic, it's the way in which the message is presented. You also seem to be assuming that "good" is equivalent to "will last a long time". I don't see that that necessarily follows.