(I’m swamped today, so thought it might be kosher to revisit this piece from Norway’s own Jens C. Brynildsen – Senior Editor at FLASH MAGAZINE)
Broken Saints is quite a bit of Flash history. From being a pet project, it turned into one of the highest awarded Flash animations ever. From the modest beginnings three years ago, until todays 12 hour, 24 chapter animated novel, the series have thrilled millions browsing the web. Now the DVD is out!
Broken Saints is a dark and depressing, but beautiful tale about four people that receive disturbing messages telling them to abandon their current lives. Using beautiful illustrations and great sound, you are drawn into a world of strong, evil forces. Broken Saints is very much an action-based story, but this is a sort of “Long form” storytelling. Things progress slowly to build up moods. To illustrate this; one of the chapters contains only a handful of drawings, but uses good narration and fading and morphing text to push the story forward. The Ninjai series is another example of such storytelling. Slow, but beautiful. It works best in front of your computer in a dark room.
This way of storytelling is something unique for the web, and it does not conform to any traditional format like film or TV. Broken Saints is strong in story, but rather shallow in terms of animation. This is not Disney animation with 24 new pictures for each second, though it clearly uses animation to tell the story.
Broken Saints can best be described as a narrated, animated comic or novel. The story is created using smart fades, transitions and panning. Despite the format, it’s a strong story that will draw you into a mysterious, magic, poetic and disturbing world. This is a true Epic story about the good and evil. Broken Saints is a modern cult classic and have received praise from publications from CNN and TechTV to Wired Magazine and USA Today. They have won the FlashForward Film Festival, Macromedia Site of the Day, The Peoples’ Choice Award at FlashInTheCan and they have even landed the prestigious online award of the Sundance Film Festival.
ANIMATED IN FLASH – DRAWN IN PAINTER
So what’s this to do with Macromedia Flash then? Brooke Burgess (writer and director of the series) decided to take a break from his job as a producer at EA Games. He traveled for a while, came back to Canada and met up with his good friend Andrew West. They decided to do a traditional comic together. Brooke would write the story and Andrew draw it. When they met up with Andrew’s friend Ian Kirby, plans were changed. Ian showed them what Flash could do and both Brooke and Andrew were sold on the idea of making a narrated, animated comic for the web. Using the web allowed them to create exactly the story they wanted, without censorship and with a potentially huge audience. The company called Budget Monks Productions was formed and they set off.
From the beginning, all the animations were done in Flash. The graphics were drawn in Painter and then imported into Flash for animation and addition of sound. As soon as an episode was finished, they’d put it online at brokensaints.com and start on the next chapter. Creating Broken Saints was a massive task and the fans were eager, so they’ve had a constant pressure to finish new episodes.
During one of these pauses, I more or less forgot about it and I didn’t watch Broken Saints again until the DVD recently dropped onto my desk. It was a pleasant surprise. One can easily see that they all have increased their skills throughout the production. Graphics are more beautiful and the storytelling more effective towards the end of the series.
For this DVD version, all scenes have been exported (using SWF2Video) and re-rendered in Combustion, a great compositing program that is sort of like Photoshop, but for video. The use of Combustion also allowed for adding some extra effects to some scenes in the DVD version. More than one million source files had to be gathered again to scale them to the right video format. The original format was 530×320 pixels at 20 fps. Video is 720 x 486 at 30 fps (American NTSC standard), so a lot of pixels were simply missing… Despite the massive amount of work, the result is really good.
BUMPY ROAD TO SUCCESS
Creating the series has not been very fruitful in terms of money. For the first few chapters, the project was supported by Switch Interactive, but they had to leave the project to do more commercial stuff. With increased popularity, there are also bandwidth costs. To avoid putting adverts on the Broken Saints site, the three guys in Budget Monks Productions had to be creative. To keep the project rolling, the creators have spent their savings, gotten donations and also arranged concerts to benefit the project. They have long hoped for a commercial investor, but this is not a story for the faint at heart. Blood, gore, fright and politics are important to the storyline. Having an Iraqi main character also makes Broken Saints a hard sell in USA and even Canada.
On the DVD’s Behind The Scenes feature, Brooke Burgess says ‘This is not fun. Right now, no one is being paid a lot of money, but we’re recording this featurette so you can see the pain involved with creating Broken Saints the Deluxe Collectors edition – if it doesn’t all go to hell and fall apart before then.’
Last year, Telefilm Canada offered funds to produce a DVD version and a lot of work has gone into this. Brooke says ‘this was a chance to revamp the entire series, add incredible new features, and make up for all the mistakes and limitations inherent in our original processes. We simply had to do it, despite the obstacles standing in our way.’ 3 years in the making – now it’s on DVD also, and the creators might get something back.
WHAT’S ON THE DVD
The DVD’s are well produced, with animated menus and nice graphics, transitions and sound. Apart from the story, there’s lot’s of extras on the DVD version. Disc one contains a Behind The Scenes program and edited versions of some of the benefit concerts. Disc two has a section showing some of the press coverage from CBC and other media, an in-story website and a video from a lecture Brooke gave at a school where he tells much of the background story and also what he thinks about Flash. Disc three has a cool section of stuff submitted by fans of the series and wallpapers, MP3s and more. Disc four has a couple documentaries and a lot of behind the scenes material (slideshows, sketches and more). There are even some hidden features on the discs too.
CONCLUSION
This disc is a true Work of Art. If you’re a fan of the series, it’s a must-have. Go pick up a copy at once. The extras alone are worth it. If you’re a Flash artist or developer, this is a bit of Flash history that you should know. Check out the original online series and buy the DVD if you like what you see. We love it and highly recommend it!
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