Animating

So the animation was supposed to be a big part of my environment. 

But whenever I tried to import the animations from Maya they didn't seem to work. 

It was either the case of it completely didn't work it was just standing still in the scene as I was walking around. Or it disappeared off the screen.
I spent days trying to figure it out, I asked my friend for help and she was telling me to do exactly what I've done before so whenever that happened and didn't work out I felt like giving up. And I did, I used to just drop it and say that I will come back to it another day.
This was the death of me because whenever I came back to it it was the same story.
When I spoke to my tutor she said it's probably because of the update. Told me yet again that I should have worked on an older version because it's patched and this problem wouldn't occur there.
But it was too late, she fixed it with something as simple as parenting it to an empty game object...
I was looking for answers so deep that I didn't think of the simple ways out.
This caused me to not really have anything animated for the deadline except that one barrel.
But I will definitely come back to it and make sure everything is beautiful for my showreel.