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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.
Remember to use the Bittorrent links for those who want to download the whole thing in one go.
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.
the point is, it's too late for people not to take us seriously. people are looking on-line for their entertainment and almost nothing is going to make them stop. bands that are frustrated with the mad struggle to get someone at a record company to listen to their demo are realizing that they can just release their stuff on-line. Sure, it may not make them rich, but it gets them heard. The ones that are good may get some money out of it in the end, but even if they don't people will keep doing it. I'm a tech person too, but there is a heavy hippie undertone to what's happening in the art community these days. It makes no difference how ceesy the "global village paradigm schtick" may be, a time is coming where people are producing art and putting it out there simply because the community wants to be entertained and it feels good to be the entertainer.
You don't have to be a flower-child to appreciate that..
lysergically yours
And only then did he submit it to /. Veeeeerrrrry clever, Mr. Anonymous Reader. Let this be a lesson to us all.
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.
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