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I've got a stiff spine.
Spine, most important thing when in a fight scene to first show anticipation of action, balance and to allow the flow of energy as you swing your arms or weapons. Cause you see, everything in a fight scene follows an arc meaning when you swing, you make curve and that curve shows power in a punch or a kick. In your video, your spine's so stiff, no movement or whatsoever is seen and I don't see any simulation of strength when Genji kicks or punches the enemy. I might also want to point out that your kicks (emphasizing the spine) shifts your balance and if you picture yourself or look at any martial arts student, you're gonna fall no matter what and he's dead by now. Spine for anticipation, well… it's something that adds some life to your animation like when Genji used that bullet stopping power (and I've got a word about Diva's mech shooting too but later), instead of raising his arm simply like that, swing back that arm with the spine twisted a bit as in to harness the power then swing it like Phoenix wright wanting to shout objection at the court.
Anyone saw where the cameraman went?
Cameras… pretty ok for your first fight animation but let me give you some tips. Camera is important as it simulates the dynamic of the scene (I assume you know the importance of camera movements) be it to show how strong the punch is or to show how "evil-ly happy" Diva was as she shoots with a slow zooming in. I would suggest you to use like a camera helper model (available in your usermod if you typed helper) in order for you to plan camera movements and placements. For the part where Genji jumps down, try improvise it by making him do a front flip and add a gimbal camera to give that dynamic feeling to your audience as if they're in the animation watching him do spectacular jumps.
places everyone!
Choreographed fight scene is easy to look at when you know who strikes first and who gets knocked down. In this animation, I know you took inspiration from the matrix but try and think a bit, if you're to take turns to punch Genji and he's surrounded, he's gotta be in constant move, pushing, dodging and counter whatever thrown at him. So the people surrounding him, they've to do something at least like shuffling around, glanced at each other, crouched a bit low so they can pounce/tackle/uppercut him or trying to save their ally. Call it, background/misc animation to keep audience's eyes busy and making the animation less bland despite music (I'm not sure you placed them but assuming you did) helping out to liven up the animation.
we fight with flow
Fighting is all about flow, imagine drawing an arc and imagine that arc keeps moving until something stops. Flow keeps the momentum moving and if you keep it up, you can execute all sorts of combination of tricks and distraction to your enemies. Things that stops your flow if your attacks are blocked or you try to make it stop. When someone blocks your flow, they'll have an advantage or a window of opportunity to strike back and you need to get recover from it. When you try to stop your flow, you're also giving them an opportunity to strike you.
I wish I can talk more but all of these must have bore you a bit. I analyze things a lot and I always help myself with a good watch on some Jackie chan fight scene or a YouTube channel called Hyun's dojo, a stick figure animation website with their YouTube channel that dedicates itself to showcase all sorts of fight animation with the occasion community collab that doesn't involved fighting.
not bad for a try of that scene.
However, seeing as you have asked for critique:
If I can be brutally honest, a scene from the Matrix films was perhaps not the best fight scene to have started with. The scene abuses the laws of physics extensively, so it's not necessarily teaching good lessons to learn and is quite unnatural to animate.
As far as the animation, it is somewhat robotic, primarily for a lack of Follow through or Overlapping action. (Look up the "12 basic principles of animation", if you're not already familiar with them).
The characters snap from keyframe to keyframe, with their entire body moving exactly in sync and with no real sense of inertia or weight.
You might also want to look at "anticipation"- although your characters tend to duck before jumping and the like (although the timing doesn't always seem quite right), the same hasn't necessarily been applied to drawing back before an attack or other "anticipation" of movements characters are about to make.
... and "secondary motion". For example, the mech is firing two gatling guns, but it stands absolutely rock-steady. There's no shake, no recoil, nothing. It needs something more to sell the power of the attack.
(Note that the original Matrix scene you're working from makes a deliberate point of showing the guns recoiling and reciprocating).
On a similar note, you often need to carry motions through more of the body (for example, a lot of the kicks don't carry the motion in how it would affect the character's balance) and include more minor movements - people don't stand completely still, so even just a shot of a character speaking or turning their head should show subtle movement throughout the whole body.
also it should have been Gordon Freeman rather than Genji, and Dva should have been Breen
what you have here is a tremendous start where you've "blocked" out all the movements and have all your shots organized and put together. Now you just need to go back into it, from the beginning, and add in more key frames to the movements which will fill out the motions and make everything more fluid. Doing so will not be hard at all once you have some more practice animating, especially since you've got all the initial tedious blocking completed.
In terms of the fight choreography, Matrix Reloaded is one of the finest action films ever made and this is easily one of it's best scenes. You have a map that fits the scene pretty well, so i think it would really be worth coming back to this project some day and i hope you do.
Speaking of maps... there used to be a Source mod game called "The Specialists" that had many maps that were directly modeled after locations from the Matrix films, including this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haa7n3UGyDc&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8OtE60T8yU&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&index=2&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-SXLaQGg50&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&index=3&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8quCbt4C-c&index=4&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OxphYV8W3E&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&index=5&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQBFsTqbKhY&index=6&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1_tZ9LhJD4&index=7&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjBHWw1TbP4&index=8&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BarOk2p38LQ&index=9&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfFj-VQKiAM&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&index=10&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7An0jukOkCI&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&index=11&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SplEuWp0Yw&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd&index=12&ab_channel=AlanBeckerTutorials
Here is what i achieved in Maya, the attacker's motion is so smooth cuz i used reference
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=777166293
it is smooth yes, but i think it needs a bit more arcs and follow through
Might wanna correct you on some part. The most important here is anticipation, arches, timing and staging.
Anticipation is more to how do you want to show your audience that he wants to do something or winding up for a certain action like jumping or kicking.
Arch is to show you the flow and how all your energy and momentum carries on during a combo as I've explained earlier. Arch also shows how your movements are like a shorter arch shows somebody walking while longer arch shows them running fast.
Timing is the most important, like, one should never avoid. Shows everything like when will the guy react, does the guy have a slow reflex action. Everything in this world is about timing. Even me typing this is considered timing on how fast I type despite having to start at the same time.
Staging is basically how you position things in a fight scene. How does this item interacts with the fighter or how am enemy gets ready to take their turn to beat the living of the fighter.
Here's a three hours live stream on how to make a combo. Brought to you by well known animators in Hyun's dojo that specializes in fighting animation.
https://youtu.be/BLZehN6QQ0I
well yeah (but all the principles you should still know)
lol
what
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lwSpkaCO2k&ab_channel=JesseBaumgartner
true, that ending part was really impressive though.