As of writing this blog, the day is Thursday, April 28th, 2022. Today I have received my Diploma from my Art College, I have completed the course and now have a piece of paper that says I am done. Some people would be ecstatic about that, they are done with school and ready to go out into the world. I however am relieved. I am finished with school, and more specifically, the awful school I went to.
This is just gonna be a short little blog detailing some of my experiences and strong memories of going to the Victoria College of Art, and hopefully tell you why you shouldn't attend if you're a Capitol City Resident, because let me tell you, I am not happy with the school.
Honestly, the course started out fine, I show up at the building do the work and the day was done. Standard things and whatnot. I had a few problems during this part of my time at the college, but nothing major. Some problems with some teachers, but nothing too bad, then we hit 2020. I remember the day well, I was in my animation class and we got the news that because of the pandemic, school was no longer going to be in person, future classes were postponed, and the planned art show was canceled. One of my friends, whom I met at the college, was looking forward to the art show, and was practically devastated that it was canceled. This is where the problems began for me at the college.
The first big problem was, that for most of us, they were terrible at communication. The one major thing that any school, business or even person in a group needs to do when communicating online is to be responsive. They did tell us when classes were beginning, and the teachers were responsible for sending out links and notifying us when they couldn't attend a class session. However, I've had classmates struggle with getting some clear and precise answers from the staff, such as if they were allowed extra time on an exam, and I had some issues getting some things in a timely manner, like receipts.
My classes were also strange. I signed up for the animation course, so you'd expect me to be given a lot of animation related classes? And I did get a good amount of them, I also got two sculpture classes, "Art Theory", a painting class, and a bunch of Art History classes that had nothing to do with animation. The funny thing is that there was a class for History of Animation, but I didn't get it, and I don't think any of my classmates did. For some reason, it was assumed that the history of architecture and fashion were more important than the history of the thing we were learning to do.
The teachers were mixed, some of them were fine. I had a good relationship with a couple teachers. There was one teacher whom I would be highly complimentary of on a good day, and on a bad day I would be less enthusiastic about, but I think I had more good days with them than not. One teacher gave us a lot of work to do, but they were a decent teacher beyond that. The not so good teachers were another story. One teacher had problems properly communicating what they wanted us to do, most likely because they were old, but it was tough to get a clear answer from him if you were even the slightest bit confused. One teacher, whom I did like, ended up missing a lot of classes, and another teacher was very unconcerned about potentially sensitive topics, like sexuality, torture and child abuse, as in they gave no warnings about these kind of subjects, and didn't even attempt to breeze through them. The worst teacher I had was actually fired by the college, so good on them, but their classes were so dull and slow, and it did not help that during those classes we were in the middle of a terrible heat wave. The worst part about them though was that their use of a certain word, now I don't use bad words on this blog because I want to keep these accessible to most people, so I can not write what word this teacher said on this blog, but it is a word that myself and a friend of mine, both of us being on the autistic spectrum, took umbrage with them using.
I don't want to make it sound like I learned nothing or got no positive experiences from going here, I had some. I did learn some important things, I found a drawing style I was more comfortable with, I learned that I probably did not want to be an animator in the future, and I made some of the best friends I ever had. That being said, college was also a big reason I had to put this blog on the back-burner for 2020 and 2021, as I had to devote time to that rather than watching movies.
There were two major problems I had though, the first being the cost. It was probably cheaper than going to other colleges, but it was still expensive, and quite frankly the quality of the education was not worth the tuition. The big reason for that is that we did not get any group projects. Animation is not a one-man show, it takes multiple people to make an animation. Some animations can be done by one person teams, but those are not as common. Most TV Shows, Movies and short films or music videos are done by teams, and we never learned how to work as a team. We were never given a group project, outside of an Acting class (Which I thoroughly enjoyed actually, probably my favourite class of the bunch), and it was tough because we were expected to complete animations by ourselves. You know how many drawings goes into a minute of animation? Math was never my strongest attribute, so I'll leave the numbers up to you, but I believe our animations were twenty-five frames per second, and there are sixty seconds in a minute. twenty-five frames per second, sixty seconds per minute.
I'm not going to go into my classmates because any issues I had with them were not the college's fault, though I did butt heads with one a bit. Hard to say I'm blameless there really.
Overall, my Art College experience was a disaster, by the end of it, I just wanted it to be over. I'm kinda glad there was no grad ceremony really, I didn't even really like my high school grad ceremony. Sitting in that cramped amphitheatre, sweating bullets just waiting for name to be called, and then waiting for everyone else's name to be called. grad ceremonies are dumb. Otherwise, a fair amount of the teachers weren't great, some of my classes were irrelevant, it was expensive, with poor communication and overall I just don't think it was worth it. All I want to do is just kind of forget about it now, put my diploma in a frame and shove it in my closet. Still, I am thankful for the friends I made while I was there, and here's to hoping for many more years together. Either way, it's finished, over and done with, and I can devote more time to this blog now.
You may have noticed I actually put out two reviews in April, well, expect that to be the norm now, two reviews each month. One on the first, and one on the fifteenth. I'm happy to be back to this really.
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