Good, but good enough
Being honest here, its hard to review being a collab piece. The idea itself is great an interesting, and I'll definately be checking out the website.
Not, for the animation. Alot of the walk cycles were poor. Rudy was the only good one there which seemed like a typical walk cycle that could have been taken from an animation book, it was good. the others, proportion, timing, spacing, didnt work. Some built nice characters, but walked poorly. And it didnt help with the background moving faster than the speed of the walk. I thin vincoid did a fat walk which had nice secondary animation with the flab...shame the actual walk was seemingly rotoscoped.
The jump cycles were much better. Chillyphilly in particular was great. Some lacked idea, or went for something that would look cool and then actually forgot to animate it. The warrior dude inparticular. Nice idea, but too ambitious, because it was hardly animated.
ChillyPhilly again excelled in the explosions, beautiful stuff, and apart from that, the rest we not very memorable.
So overall, some guys are good, alot do not show enough work. For a weekly project, producing walk cycles of that quality is not good enough, and was something that could have been done in a day easily. A week on a walk cycle, you better be adding some character, conveying emotion, and have a detailed character aswell. One week! A walk cycle is like 15 drawings, 30 maximum. Jumps are harder to get right, but at least some of them were good and showed some promise. The explosions, again, a week, and alot of them looked like they were done in a day.
Some people seemed to have viewed this perhaps as a way to get popular by jumping on the collab bandwagon because animation tests and collabs get votes. Unfortunately, alot of guys forgot the mechanics of animation, and to even add character or make the images believable.
The only explanation for taking a week to produce some of these tests is either they have never used flash before, or they simply dont care enough. And when people dont care, its insulting to the ones who do.
