Broken Sword-Background Intro

[Guybrush379]

I'm studying the best way to create Flash animations for cutscenes.
At the moment I need some people help me with advices on drawing with Flash. My graphic pen doesn't work well and I cannot draw at best with mouse.
Flash cannot trasform images jpeg in vectors, so how can I do?

However, thinking something...

I have made the first part of my Intro sequence in Flash but I will use photorealistic backgrounds, not these ones

Here my first background parts for the Intro

[raimo]

I think it looks great. But in my opinion it could use quite a lot more saturation and much warmer tones.

[Khris]

It's blurry as hell. Looking at it really hurt my eyes.

I had my tracing problems in flash, too. I think the image must be a gif, bmp or png or some other pixel-true format.

[Guybrush379]

The idea was to simulate a sort of "Tele long focus" but in fact I have my original version without blur. I think I'll use later in the game as background.

[Erwin_Br]

The road looks too narrow. I recommend to make it double as wide. (The current road would be wide enough for one lane).

Another option is to make the sign smaller. (You could also say the road is fine, but the sign's too big)

--Erwin

[hedgefield]

I agree on the road, i think making it wider is the better option if you compare it to the rest of the enviroment. And if you're going for depth of field, the focal distance needs to be a lot further. At least behind the sign.

Contrary to the name, the Trace Bitmap option in Flash does actually handle any image you import. Or if you have Photoshop, what you could try is using the Artistic>Cutout filter. That'll kinda simulate vector art. Depends on the type of image really.

[Guybrush379]

Ya, right observations. The sign is too big for this background. It's not simple colouring big backgrounds. What do you suggest for a static background? What's the best way to simulate that hand-colouration of Broken Sword games?

In fact I'm using artistic effect on images as background for cutscenes, concentrating more on characters and others.