like the man said, he'll be doing a lot of tweaking later on... i know what it feels like to do a project for so long... (although technically i did enough for my 'sponsor' to see progress even though i worked on it for like a day or so per week for 30 weeks - my senior thesis for my bfa in 3d animation)

when i worked on that project i was stuck with working in maya 3.0 cause it's all that was out at the time. there was no mental ray, no fluid effects, heck half the poly and nurbs tools out now (not to mention light and rendering options) even existed, and we had to do stuff the old-fashioned way... tweaking lights and reflections and ambience and there was no such thing as ambient occlusion and GI and HDRI... we had to light and texture from experience and knowledge instead of using a plugin or exterior plugin like zbrush we had to map our UVs accordingly and do the work ourselves without wacom tablets (plugins for photoshop were still in beta) in PS... i just started playing with maya 7.0 after saving up for a long time after getting the original 3.0 student version, and damn you guys are spoiled.

after watching the opening sequence i am able to say that the animation is pretty good, you've got some good ambient motion in your character, although people say it's a bit mechanical, i do believe that with tweaks you'll make it your own and it'll be great. i'd love to see how he ends up actually getting the diamond (or failing miserably as we see he praises many a movie based on heists and if you learn from those you're bound to fail in a hysterical way heh) so keep up the good work!

every time i turned in a proposal for an animation project in school they always said it was too 'ambitious', but for most ideas i was able to prove them wrong. if this little animation is for your thesis, then i say cheers. it's got the audience begging for more, and there's little that can be done besides spending a lot in advertising or whoring yourself linkwise that can accomplish what you did in just the animation alone.

as far as watching the animation, i've gotta say that the transitions in the home work better than i thought after seeing some textures, and that in most big budget productions they've got something ALWAYS moving... be it eyes, hair flowing, something in the background, etc. i feel you do this pretty well, but there seem to be some people that aren't comfortable with your character's movements... for this i would simply suggest acting out each scene, or at least imagine it in your head. if you were dangling from a rope would you eventually come to a standstill, or would the rope actually end up twisting you into a undesireable angle? perhaps instead of the thief trying to swing himself and the rope breaking, he tries to get himself into position but the rope keeps turning and he ends up facing the wrong way and falling on his face... it would go with him pulling on the plunger device and falling without the glass attached, and the extra rotating the character does would make the 'robotic' movements less noticeable without having to change more than you need to. the zipper on the bag, if you watch it enough times, works faster than his zipping motion, but once is enough. the eye isn't really fast enough to notice. i've gotta say that i DID notice that the poles around the diamond display had fallen down, maybe you could show that he fell in an awkward position and they just fell flat afterwards. it wouldn't take much animation-wise (downward movement in z, then maybe a quick thud animation), and then we know why the poles fell. hell it might get a laugh. but i go too far. we know you'll tweak it later, so these are just suggestions. as far as what i see, i'm still quite impressed. glad you posted the animation and hopefully after your (well deserved) hiatus we'll see an update!