[Penguin]

Okay, so here's the deal. I'm the animation captain for team 166, Merrimack NH's Chop Shop. We attended the BAE regional this past weekend, and also will be attending the Buckeye Regional in week 4.

When uploading our animation two weeks ago, we kept getting error messages, and had exchanged emails with the people at Autodesk, but their responses were by and large neither helpful nor really informative in any way.

One of their emails said our file on the Streamline server was corrupt, so if we brought a working copy to our regional on DVD, it should be able to be judged. I responded saying our team was not in possession of a DVD burner but we'd do our best to bring it on CD if they'd just let us know where we needed to submit it and when, but received no response.

So I went wandering to try to find out where partway through the competition on Thursday (during our longest break between matches), and after being sent to about six different places-- including the information table... who said they didn't know, ironically enough-- I ended up at the room and... surprise! they'd already started judging.

Apparently they'd announced the beginning of student judging in the PITS but not in the stands-- so that they could prevent as many animators as possible from finding out, I guess.

So I gave the lady there the CD, and she said to come back in 20 minutes so we can judge. 20 minutes later, we walk down and go into the room, and she tells me the file on the CD was corrupt (which I'm sure it wasn't, because I opened the file from the CD on three or four school library computers and a laptop), so it won't be able to compete, but we can still judge... and then she says we need to have our ballots.

I was never given a ballot, in fact, our team never received them. When we signed in at our regional, there was absolutely no mention made of the animation competition or anything remotely related to it. So in front of everyone else in the room doing judging, she told us we had to leave. Because it's our fault we didn't have a paper, apparently.

Then, of course, they didn't even show the winning animation during the awards ceremony, but that's just icing on this already messed-up cake.


Now, last night I was at a teammate's house till late for our post-comp party, and when I got home I crashed in bed. And then when I woke up this morning around 11:30, I came online to check my email, having not checked it for three days... and I found an email, forwarded to me from our head mentor, saying that any teams whose files were corrupted or who had a missing animation, and were intending to compete in a later regional, could reupload them... by 12:01 AM Sunday.

On the weekend of five different regionals, we were expected to still be awake and checking our email that late at night in order to resubmit our animations.


We were really looking forward to getting to participate in the Buckeye Regional, after spending this whole weekend feeling cheated out of all our hard work, and now this. I can't help but feel cheated again.

I don't understand this at all. Has anyone else had any problems like this? Is there anything we can do about it?