Broken Saints Finale Available

An anonymous reader writes "The hour-and-a-half finale to the killer animated Web comic Broken Saints is finally available. I just finished watching it, and I can't believe that only three guys made the damn thing. The story is intense, the music kicks, and the art's cool if you dig anime. Nice effects, really cool style, and even some nice Linux hacking scenes." We've covered this award-winning Flash-animated series previously.

Comments

Bittorrent

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Remember to use the Bittorrent links for those who want to download the whole thing in one go.

Too bad it is Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad it is a Flash file. I have it turned off to avoid 5 minute waits to enter web sites and it also gets rid of a lot of ads on pages (not only that, it is obnoxious in that it ignores browser "no sounds at all" settings).

Re:Too bad it is Flash

[OctaneZ]

If you're using Mozilla, or a mozilla derived browser, you can add Ted Mielczarek great Flash, Click to Play extension: extension installer. You can find info on it here and here.

To those of you just starting to watch BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that this started over 3 years ago when both technology and politics were different.
To watch the evolution, especially of the art and flashwork, is quite amazing also!
I just can't believe it's finally over.

i hate flash..

[Suppafly]

I hate flash movies because there is no good way to pause them and come back, nor is there a good way to fast forward or rewind or do anything that you normally would when watching video. Flash is alright for those annoying interactive websites, but its damn annoying for movies.

Re:i hate flash..

[JackAxe]

You can pause, forward and reverse with Flash using Action Script. Here's an excellent example made a couple of years back and it was done with Flash 5. Make sure to click on "Advanced Controls" buton in the upper right when watching the prologue. http://www.becominghuman.org/

Here is a direct link

[arcadum]

http://bs.brokensaints.com/chapters/chapter24.prol ogue.swf

Re:A mplayer-like program for flash files?

[JackAxe]

Here's a link to the Linux player: =) http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/alter nates/

The limitations of flash

[popo]

The problem is that even with Flash MX's great JPG compression and vector graphics, the technique used by most flash animators is to apply a series of animation techniques to a small set of images.

In other words, the animation is a set of instructions, and the downloaded data is kept to a minimum.

The upshot of this is that while there's a lot of movement on the screen, it gets pretty repetitive. For example, during the intro, we see the same artwork (various faces) used over and over again using a variety of different animation effects.

Whereas film uses a separate image for every frame, flash can use 3 or 4 images and a set of instructions. But these 3 or 4 images (flashed, panned, faded and moved around the screen), hardly approach the immersive experience of thousands of frames used in film.

In an era of digital video and truly fantastic compression technologies, this approach seems dated. True, the potential audience for flash movies may be larger, but that seems like a business decision and not a creative one.

They've done a great job with the medium, but unfortunately this medium, as with so many others online, is extremely limited.