Hey,
I’ve just turned into an on-the-side, when-I-have-time animator. Starting small, my first project was in a computer game engine (the Essence Engine from Company of Heroes) at around 1 minute in total.
Here’s the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZLqJoDIGpY
Now, I want to be completely butchered. I spent three weeks on this (well, to be fair, most of the time teaching myself the toolset) so I really want some good feedback, do’s, don’ts and to see how it’s evaluated by the harshest crew on the net.
What think ye?
Love,
Eb.
The self-cleaning blood pool is a nice touch.
The graphics per se are good. The color is too hued toward magenta. It makes your blood (and your fire) too cranberry. Blood should be more like a very dark red wine. And fire should be more orange. You can just add yellow for that.
Agree on the cranberry, though my biggest complaint is that the rate of enemy fire is far too quick. It makes a couple of the later troops’ maneuvers (walking right through the line of fire with almost impossibly lucky precision) strain credulity–and I assume you’re shooting for some semblance of “believability” here.
That wiggly “camera pan” about 4/5ths of the way in is distracting… use a rotatin g POV, maybe? Also, the other comments on your colour usage are valid, and, perhaps its just U-tube, but the shadows seem a little dark.
Regards, and keep up the hard work!
FML
Serious question: What’s the point? What is your goal? Can you give me an example of a work that is similar to what you are trying to accomplish?
Is it meant to have sound? I tried it in IE and Firefox and didn’t hear anything.
I’m probably missing the point of it though. As per Contrapuntal’s post, if you give us an idea what it was for, it might be easier to give useful feedback. I’d like to be helpful, but I don’t know what, specifically, I’m critiquing. 
Ah, there’s no actual “point” per se - it’s more of a tech demo, a minor demonstration that I’m getting to know the software. It’s just an action sequence, nothing more.
Noted that I need to work more on the color balance - thanks! 
I can do that in the video capture tools, if not the Essence Engine itself - well, when I get Premiere that is. I’ll keep it in my mind for the next projects!
Bryan Ekers: Hehe 
The movie actually ends a few seconds before that (the 1-minute mark) so when I put the “stop” animation to the “state_wounded(true)” function, it went away on it’s own I’ll keep it for the duration in the next take.
Oh, and the wiggly cam is no more. Yeah, it was a bit distracting and not really what I was trying to accomplish.
Thanks for all the replies so far
Edit: No, by the way, it doesn’t have sound.
So you’ve created all the characters and are telling them where to go?
Nifty! 
Character movement is to slow. The movement is jerky, but is that within your ability to fix? The rate of travel doesn’t match the rate of character movement. An example is like watching a running charater moving the distance a runner should but moving only in a mannor equivant to a walk. I can’t explain the reality sync problem beter. The gunfire doesn’t cut down the people moving in the fire path of the rear gunners. I don’t know if you’re trying to generate realistic characters and movement, or only working with editing video.
Yeah, I think the soldiers move too slowly. For more realism I think they should move at different speeds from one another and also maybe flinch a tiny bit when a bullet’s line of fire just barely misses their head.
There’s a bit of an issue with character and object boundaries. The soldiers seem to sink into the cobblestones somewhat - it’s most noticeable looking at the lead guy’s feet as he passes the wall, just before he gets shot, but the corpses do it, too.