Advice regarding 2D art

Hey everyone,

A friend of mine and I are putting together a mobile app/ game. The game is a medieval fantasy RPG. The player controls the game by doing fitness exercises in the real world. It's essentially a fitness app for gamers.

I have a design-related question I'd like to ask:

We are trying to figure out how to design the visuals. None of us can do those, so we will hire someone to create them for us. We need something (relatively) cheap and simple. At the same time, the visuals need to convincingly convey a gripping atmosphere. The game has to look believable, so that players can immerse themselves in it. We are toying with the idea of simply using CG images like this one:

[Blocked Image: https://healthpsychologyconsultancy.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/shadow_warrior.jpg]

Music, SFX and a narrator would do the rest to make the image more effective.

What are your thoughts on this? Are there better/ alternative approaches? Is it possible to somehow animate such images (of only slightly)? I'm thinking of something similar to how Dragon's Crown handles NPCs (the guild master in the video below @06:38):

Other suggestions, questions or feedback of any kind are welcome as well, of course!

Thanks in advance,

Nikola

Phenomenal response, thx a lot.

First time I hear about the parallax effect, but it is exactly what I was looking for. It appears to be some kind of image warping (with small amplitudes) of a foreground image that is composed onto a background image to create the illusion of movement.

So who exactly would I be looking for? Are 2D artists in general adept at this, or is there a particular type of artist that specializes in animating 2D art?