Please could you give me your opinion about this hard rejection? I cannot imagine what is happening in the mind of the reviewers as they have answered with a generic and unclear explanation…
This is my after effects template, a Christmas intro with 3d character animation:
I have seen much much lower quality after effects templates along the same line, being accepted recently. So I don’t understand anything.
Your quality is very good… but the idea is repeated
The customers want new ideas … SO focus in the next time on uniqueness in your works and ideas
I see lot of changes you need to done in the present project. Overall the animation looks great for me. But the Title is one of the thing I really look for. You have used Cursive font and you have used Kerning which is not goes well with cursive fonts. and also particles on the title and logo are not pleasing the scene. And also boil effect is not going well with titles. Doing small changes to the overall animation and bringing small changes to the idea may look unique and will give you sales too. I hope you understand What I am saying. Good luck 
The 3D work is amazing, but it needs improvements on the titles. This particle effect on the titles looks bad. It would be better without it. Titles are small enough too. You cant read them. I think it was rejected because of aesthitics issues.
I would buy it! I could not do that in a million years
Everything looks Great! 3D animation is pretty good but there is a little bit problem with your text revealing and particle. Try to use trapcode particular and make it more festive looks! creat another camera animation and submit it. Hopefully it will approved.
I think the character animation can use some work. Santa clause is turning like a robot when he turns from the snowman to the bag. There is no life to this character imo.
Thanks guys. Well looking at your comments, the question is, do you think it really deserves a hard rejection?
Shouldn’t it be a soft rejection just in case? I mean the reviewer can tell me “change this little thing”, like you all are telling me… Because what you are pointing to is small changes.
But for the overall quality all the people is saying adjectives like “everything looks great!”, “very good quality”, “3d work is amazing”, “I would buy it!”…
Well the only one is Creattive, and you are still saying “some work” for the animation, and of course the animation is not perfect, but should it be? I think the animation is better than many others I have seen in the market. What do you think Creattive about the overall look, usefulness, etc? Is it so bad?
Just here some examples of Christmas intros along the same lines that were recently approved:
https://videohive.net/item/christmas-fary-tale/24939934
https://videohive.net/item/santa-claus-with-reindeer-goes-on-the-way/25000001
Please tell me what you think, what’s the difference between their template and mine??
Because the only difference I see is that I’m a new contributor and they aren’t…
Man this is hard. Most of the time the rejections i see posted on forums are completely understandable, but i think you might’ve came 90% close to approval with this one, and just didn’t make the cut. Gonna have to take the loss on this one, unfortunately. If it helps, I do believe also it’s better some of the examples you posted
But I wouldn’t go down that road of comparing it to recently approved ones, just have to suck it up and try to perfect it next time. I do think you were super close to approval with this one.
Let me answer that with this sentence: I would not buy it because of the lacking character animation. I’d rather buy one of the great templates on videohive without an animated character that is good in what it wants to be, even if that is something different. In the end, we have a lot of christmas animations and so many of them do also use the “a star is rotating around a tree” theme, that I can go with a more abstract but in my opinion more polished, professional looking template than to use this comic-looking santa claus that doesn’t move in a comically way and looks a tad unfinished.
Other works may look worse and my quality limit may be well above the one of an average buyer here. (So this may find his buyers in the current form). But this animation is in my opinion not perfect even for what it wants to be (or especially for what it wants to be) and that is really needed to disregard a hard rejection: being executed perfectly.
You can resubmit after you made “significant” changes. Hard rejection does not mean you may never submit it again, you just have to put work into it. At least that is how I understand it.
Comparing with others doesn’t really help, might just be another reviewer or luck or whatever. However, I actually do prefer the second link you posted over your rejected animation. Although santa claus is animated a bit too slow there as well, I like the whole animation more.
Also, both templates you linked to have either zero or only few sales. So nothing dramatic. The bad performance of those items may be a reason for only accepting higher quality items in that category.
Well I don’t understand why I shouldn’t go down that road of comparing it with others approved, and suck it up, Voxyde. Because in this case you are saying that this is 90% close to approval. So then it means that this shouldn’t be a hard rejection… 90% close to approval should mean soft rejection, just in case.
So perhaps is a mistake of the reviewer then… Why shouldn’t we talk about it? Reviewers are not god and they make mistakes too. Why shouldn’t they acknowledge it?
Even you Creattive, despite all of your negative comments, (which I appreciate, don’t get me wrong, I always want to hear the negative), you also acknowledge that to be accepted might depend on “the reviewer, the luck or whatever”… Well I think you agree with me that this is not right and it should be objective always.
And you also recognise that, despite your other preferences, this template may find his buyers in the current form.
Besides, regarding the repeated idea, well I think for Christmas there is always repeated ideas, as you play with the typical Christmas symbols, the originality is in the way you present it… And I didn’t see anything presented this way, which I think makes it different and unique.
Overall it’s great but so far i think the idea is been used many times before. Maybe any updated version of the Santa clause and snowman to the bag with another dimension would work perfect.
It seems that you see what you want to see from posts above. Soft reject usually means that you should make minor technical changes like fixing missing files errors, change photos/videos with not suitable licensing for previews and so on. Yours issues are bigger than this and most of them were pointed out in comments above, as for me I would also hard reject it, just look at this moment: https://youtu.be/oYi_qLzgRR4 this camera movement isn’t smooth and feels shaky +combining movements of Santa and Titles animation which is very off-scene (that turbulence noise distortion is going off the whole scene atmosphere). So basically you have issues in every part of animation, some of them should be changed completely +you have no Ending animation.
As reviewers are humans this can never be 100% objective. Your work is not perfect and a rejection is therefor justified. I would work on the things people mentioned here and resubmit. Maybe next year if the deadline is too close for this year.
I think your work is excellent & should definitely not be rejected. Brilliant animation & Christmas message, you get a definite thumbs up from me!
Its excellent work, and looks like it took a lot of work! However things are judged for their genre…so you have a lot of competition. I think all the comments about the Titles, and slight robotic quality are good points. Sure it could have been accepted but now you have the opportunity to turn it into better sales. These days I always seem to get rejected a couple times when posting something, especially when it is a new category/genre for me…and yes, I get quite pissed about it…but go for a walk and cool off, then back to work.
DREAMYARD_Visuals, I don’t have a clue what you are talking about, and where such big errors are in the animation, as you aren’t indicating anything in the video, neither you are explaining it in a clear language.
Not 100% objective… how much percent would you say? 90%? is it 80? 70? Well then I’m coming back to my question: if they are humans, they make mistakes too. What if they acknowledge their mistakes?
Thank you for your total thumbs up! It’s good to know that the people see the value and the work behind!
Thanks for your kind words and support! Yes indeed it was a lot of work. And about the genre, competition I don’t see much. You can search by yourself, how many templates with 3d animations with Santa Claus are with this quality? Not too many.
It is a lot of work also because it’s 3d work + a logo reveal. Before starting it, I made a thorough research about the market, what is accepted, what sells and what not, because there is a lot of risk, time consuming in this template. You need a lot of skills, experience, hardware-software, and time to do 3D at this level. That’s why there are not too many with good quality, specially with character animation and a lot of elements.
I also made sure that the titles were customizable, and worked also with any logo… With several controls for changing color and style, size, position, kerning, etc. All presented quite in a clean and clear way, with videotutorial step-by-step, and pdf included.
The curious thing is that in this type of templates with 3D animation, the less important part seems to be the titles, thing that was the most commented. But in the first of the examples I have indicated above, you can see that the title is quite simple and still got accepted… The other one has also not so much work on the titles.
Anyway, despite that, I worked quite a lot on the titles making it customizable and I put some cascade fireworks effects, that I didn’t think they looked bad aesthetically.
But, perhaps making the titles more simple would work now and get approved? Who knows… I only know that after all of this work done in 3d (modelling, texturing, rigging, animation, lighting, render, etc), and then in after effects (comp, motion graphics,etc) I’m not going to risk such tremendous amount of my time re-doing the 3d animation and the titles, trying to make it “perfect”, most probably for nothing, because after seen this, it seems to be like a lottery.
I don’t see perfection in other templates with 3D animation approved, why mine should have it? I think it’s quite closer to perfection than others, as can be seen by the comments and given the fact that it is a 3D animation with a character and a complete environment, etc, which is always difficult to produce and not abundant in the market.
But let’s look at what is important here, would the people buy it? And I think the answer is yes. It doesn’t have to be perfect, to sell. And you did acknowledge Creattive, that the average buyer doesn’t look for technical perfection.
So what’s the problem? Is it not a good, useful Christmas animated greetings presentation? Well you just have to look at the last comments, and the others before, and the adjectives the people is using to describe it, on the overall. Of course you can decide to focus on the flaws, and try to justify the “point” of the reviewer, but the reality is that in every single approved template you can see flaws. And when there are a lot of reactions with words like “excellent”, “great”, “amazing”, to a rejected item… There must be something wrong here…
Perhaps is that the market is saturated. And the reviewers don’t have time for new contributors (specially in Black Friday), and don’t want to spend time on checking everything. Which I would consider quite a mistake on their part.
With the ever increasing number of projects and the chances of making good sales becoming increasingly difficult one really questions if this is the best use of their time. Add to that more critical reviewers. This is a natural outcome of a saturated marketplace. I noticed many of the best authors from a few years ago no longer post. One is better off seeking out extra freelance clients… however when nothing is happening it beats doing jigsaw puzzles to keep the brain current and active. And makes for nice coffee money.
I understand your willing to fight for your project, but there are issues which won’t let this item to be accepted. If you read comments above one more time - you could find reasons of your rejection.
I can sum up some points:
My suggestion is to compare your item with the highest quality animations you can find, this will make easier to understand whether your item is good enough.
What’s the point to compare your project with low-quality projects on the market? 
If you want to understand the reason of the rejection and get approval next time, you should compare your project with the best projects of the market, and even try to surpass them.
I’m sorry, but I think you just do not want to listen to the advice of teammates. All reasons have already been indicated here more than once: the final scene with text, camera animation, character animation.
Sometimes it’s hard to understand what a market client needs when you first entered the market. My first project was also rejected. The main thing is not to give up 