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Burgess was working for video game giant Electronic Arts at the time, but was one day struck by inspiration. “It wasn’t really a convergence, but really more like a collision was what seemed to be happening,” says Burgess on the phone from Vancouver. “How can we exist with the way we are developing technically and also develop as spiritual creatures?” Burgess took his feelings about politics, technology, warfare, pharmaceuticals, the oil industry, and myriad other issues and decided to put them all down in a single package he would come to call Broken Saints. “Really I just wanted to express as much as I could about what I was observing in modern culture. I guess there had been this fusion in my own life between working with this modern communications technology and this burgeoning spiritual side.”

Broken Saints first appeared on the Internet in 2001 and ran through with new episodes until 2003; there were 24 chapters and 12 hours in all. It more or less looks and moves like a pen and paper comic with word balloons and static figures, but this comic also comes with music and sound effects. The story follows four strangers from opposite sides of the globe who are all struck with a vision of some kind of gathering evil. They each begin a search to discover the truth behind the vision only to find out how their destinies are intertwined with the fate of the world.

Burgess thought about a number of ways to bring the story to life, but a number of factors made him decide to do Broken Saints as a web comic. “I’ve always loved graphic novels; I’ve loved the presentation and the fact that you can get poetic, that it was often about internal monologue for the characters, that you could use different types of narrative structure.”

After a year of promoting Broken Saints online in a word-of-mouth campaign, the series got the attention of the Sundance Film Festival and was included in the Flash Forward Film Fest. Burgess, West, and Kirby had to go down to Park City with their series and were able to raise the money through fundraising concerts for bus tickets and a place to stay in Utah. It won the audience award for animation and started getting mainstream attention across North America after previously getting attention from only Europe and Asia.

“I think that those audiences are more patient,” says Burgess of the reason Broken Saints clicked overseas first. “North Americans—and you can see this in how bad most movies are—have horrible attention spans, and there’s no true vision, just corporate overseers saying, ‘Well what do the kids like today?’ No one has the patience for what a classic myth or real story is meant to do and that’s let you get to know the characters and understand what they want in their lives, paint this hypnotic portrait and have rising action over time, and then you have this profound climax that’s supposed to teach you something about your life.”

Aside from promotion, another benefit of winning at Sundance was getting some attention from mainstream distributors in Canada like Telefilm Canada. Burgess had applied years before to Telefilm, but now they were interested in the property as a possible DVD box set. “It wasn’t just a matter of moving the chapters over to DVD,” according to Burgess as to the initial challenges of meeting Telefilm’s proposal. “We had to redo at least half of the art; we wanted to do optional voiceovers and redo all the scores, behind-the-scenes featurettes; and they said, ‘Well, put in an application’.”

They received a $250,000 grant for a proposed $500,000 budget to create the DVDs. Burgess and his team did three years of material in nine months. There were no changes to the story, only changes to presentation, and with a team 35, they worked to make a more immersive experience than watching the series on a computer screen. Burgess thinks the biggest, most impressive change from Flash to DVD is the addition of the voices, despite the way some initially found it weird to hear a voice while reading what’s on screen. Six months later, Fox picked it up at the San Diego Comic Con. From there they remastered it again in three months and worked with them to develop packaging and marketing campaign.

As for what’s next, Burgess is still in negotiations with three publishers for developing a Broken Saints video game; he originally planned to announce his decision before next year’s E3, but he’s since decided to make an announcement sooner. He’s also in discussions about a live-action Broken Saints, just probably not a film; a mini-series or limited-run series is more likely. He’s also working on another project with Telefilm providing partial funding that will take place over multiple mediums.