John e-mailed me his animation to edit together and added this concerning this thread:

"For future contests, I'd be in favour of variations in collaborative projects like picture consequences, with separate animators dealing with legs, body and head (to take a person as an example). Doing the same thing each month could get tiresome -- I think it's good to mix and match. Just my two pennies.."

You have a good point Scott. Maybe adding the voice tracks would be a middle ground where we get the best of both worlds.

Nor would I as a relatively new user,  I like them.  Perhaps there are more formats available to play with;  They could follow a single theme, a line of dialogue from an existing work - or a line of poetry of literature, or music.  Maybe a first second and third winner could suggest words that are then placed in order of succession to generate a random theme:  eg.
First prize: "Drummer"
Second Prize: "Chewing"
Third Prize "Marbles"
Challenge = "Drummer Chewing Marbles"
That way even the winners are challenged...

For the whole prizes thing, why not have two winners? Like one winner could be "Marc's Pick" and the other could be "Viewer's Pick"? Like with the current prizes, the Marc's Pick would win Anime Studio Pro and the Viewer's Pick could win Debut. Those are just my thoughts however.

I'd like to see the regular challenges continue, with each person doing their own film based on the set theme.  (I don't find time to do them, but I do watch and vote in the live show.)  But an occasional variation like this one is good too!
I think it was partly the idea of contributing to an ad to help out, and partly the fact that 4 seconds isn't so demanding, that made this challenge so wildly popular.  I don't know if it would maintain thr same level if it was on every month.
Just a couple of things to sort out before the next group project like the ad -  probably need to settle on a common frame size as well as frame rate.  It may have to be 640 x 480 if that's the best some cameras can do.  But I guess you could have a higher res, widescreen framing animation, with smaller images on a tv screen. 
A weird idea, an animated version of the mix and match head, body, and legs thing... but I like it!
Working to a common soundtrack was also really good - each person knew how long they had and what needed to be going on, but with room for interpretation.  So I second the audio clip idea.  That also applies to each one doing their own film - all using the same audio track could work for that too.