Not The Most Animated Classmate

I study 2D animation. My university doesn’t require a portfolio to apply, only grades. This results in some people who don’t know how to do art but have good grades applying to art school and then dropping a year in because they thought the degree would be easy before realizing how incredibly rigorous the school’s workload is, even with relearning fundamentals — or in some cases, straight-up having to learn fundamentals for the first time — for a full quarter. The sophomore population can drop dramatically within a year.

Enter [Student]. [Student] is a 2D animation student with a minor in illustration. He is also horrible at taking feedback. I don’t mean that he throws a hissy fit; he is actually fairly nice outside of classes. I mean that he doesn’t actually apply critique or feedback to what we need him to do. 

In my very first project with him as a team member, we were taking an effects class and needed to animate a flaming arrow flying through the air and landing in the water, leaving a smoke trail — within three weeks. 

I was assigned the role of the group leader. In assigning tasks, having seen [Student]’s projects up to that point, I wasn’t super trusting that he could do the other effects and gave him the arrow. 

He gave back a file where the arrow slowed at the end when it hit the water. I liked where it originated, so I asked if he could make it a bit quicker at the end and give us a new version. This was a very simple task by any animator’s standards; you would remove a few drawings at the end.

After two days, [Student] gave us a file that moved far too evenly throughout. Checking, he had actually added frames to the rest of the file. Maybe he had somehow misunderstood. I told him that while I appreciated it, I actually had just meant to take out a few drawings at the end. Explicit instructions. Surely this couldn’t be messed up?

Nope. He added drawings. The arrow was also too stiff. These changes took him another two days. At this point, we were actually behind since we needed the arrow to do any of the other effects, and we had a very short time to get this project done. I asked him to please hand over the file, and I gave it to one of the other animators to redo.

This task also took him another day. At this point, he’d wasted almost a whole workweek on what was supposed to be the simplest part of the animation — which the animator who fixed it did in an hour.

He never attended a single one of our supplementary meetings, either. Not one. 

The professor complimented us on how well our final had progressed from the original version she’d seen and how she liked the path of the arrow and where it originated from. So, it seems like she gave credit where it wasn’t due.

However, something [Student] had missed on the day that the final was assigned (because he was conspicuously absent) was that the group leader was always in communication with the professor… including a final report after the project had ended, giving an explanation of what each team member had done.

Guys… that email might’ve been professional, but it was absolutely brutal. I gave honest and glowing reviews to my other teammates, who absolutely knocked it out of the park with both the amount of work they did and the quality. 

To give you an idea of how it looked, I was saying stuff like, “[Classmate A] did a super job with communication! [Classmate B] made it to all of our extra meetings and redid an entire section of the animation after feedback! [Classmate C] was proactive about saying she had nothing to do because she was waiting on [Classmate B] and asked if there was anything else she could do!” in my intro sentence for each classmate.

Then, I got to [Student], and that segment started with a, “[Student] finished the work, but…” 

This project was worth fifty percent of the grade. It was a big project because it was supposed to show just how much we’d improved from the start of class.

[Student] didn’t fail — some professors are too nice and grade it solely on whether they fulfilled the criteria here — but he didn’t pass with flying colors, either.