cut scene where party is in boat on river, then gets off

I find myself stumped for what appears to be a rather simple kind of cut scene. I want the scene to open with the party on a boat sailing down a river (not on the worldmap - on a regular exterior map), then the boat stops next to a dock tile, and the party emerges from the boat.

Would you just use the vehicle sprite and set a move route across the screen, then stop it, and have the player then appear on the dock tile? I know how to accomplish this, it just seems a rather amateurish approach to it, and I'm wondering if there's a better way to present such a scene.

My main concern is that the ship vehicle sprite is way too small compared to the scale of everything else on a normal exterior map...it's meant for a worldmap scale. But I can't think of any better way to do it.

Any advice would be much appreciated - thanks in advance!

You could do as you suggest, or you could use an actual vehicle (have the screen dark while the party gets on the vehicle if necessary), use a move route to move it, then use the Get On/Off Vehicle command. If you don't want the player to be able to get back on the vehicle afterwards, use a Set Vehicle Location and Set Event Location to move the vehicle to an unused map and replace it with an event that looks the same.

If the biggest problem is the size of the ship, replace it with another ship a more appropriate size.

When I worked on a similar cutscene, I took the easy way out: I made a map with the inside of the ship and arranged the various party members around a table, talking about the destination. I used a sea BGS and set a looping parallel event with soft screen shaking to simulate the movement of the boat :)

In one of my games where I needed the player to move around a lake in a rowing boat, I made a vehicle sprite which had a (very small) version of the main character apparently rowing. When the player disembarked, it switched to the normal empty boat on the water and the ordinary player sprite on land. I think it worked well, (and players thought it was fun to watch), so you might want to play around with something like that.