Just after noon, Tullman sits in a darkened classroom watching for the first time a trippy video about projection mapping. Devin Wambolt, a second-year visual-effects major, narrates as his onscreen self assembles a blocky structure from boxes and paper. The student explains how he used camera, projector, and 3-D software to create a perpetually mutating three-dimensional canvas. As he speaks, the structure writhes into life, bathed in pulsing psychedelics and distorted real-time images. "Very cool," murmurs Tullman, the possibilities already percolating in his brain. Ninety minutes later, he is in a meeting pitching Wambolt's technology, among other ideas, to the team leading the renovation of Navy Pier.
Flashpoint fields roughly 70 inquiries a week from individuals and organizations wanting help producing a video, a mobile application, or an interactive marketing tool. They seek out the school for its speed of execution, youthful talent (its students represent the demographic clients often want to reach), and low price (most projects cost about 25 percent of what a professional production company charges). Flashpoint accepts 30 to 50 projects each year and assigns them to student teams, with faculty oversight. "We select projects for three major reasons," says Edward Glassman, vice president of marketing and business development. "First, we want our students to have that killer material in their portfolios so they can get a job. Second, it goes a long way for our brand to be associated with Microsoft or Sony or McDonald's. Finally, it's great outreach to prospective students."
Certainly, the school benefits when Tyra Banks yells, "Holla, Flashpoint!" on Good Morning America. Banks is one of several celebrities to bring projects to the school, which designed the cover for her novel, Modelland, featuring a computer-generated eye. Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose appeared in a no-texting-while-driving PSA created by Flashpoint for AT&T Illinois.
Projects like these feed the school's scholarship fund, but the end game is jobs. Roger Ebert and his wife, Chaz, collaborated with Flashpoint on the pilot for the most recent incarnation of their film-review program, Ebert Presents At the Movies. They have since hired several Flashpoint students as interns and offered full-time employment to two, including a broadcast major who is now an associate producer. Overall, the school's graduate placement rate is 75 percent. Intent on minting graduates who are, first and foremost, great employees, Flashpoint evaluates students not only on technical prowess but also on such attributes as accountability, respect, collaboration, initiative, and attentiveness. Performance in those areas is tracked on a public graph, and the plummiest projects go to the most professionally behaved. "These standards are incredibly important to employers—in many cases just as important as technical know-how," says Glassman.
Inevitably, a few members of each class breathe in the entrepreneurial spores Tullman leaves in his wake and go on to start, or try to start, companies. In the sprawling Merchandise Mart, about half a mile from the school, Flashpoint maintains—in addition to a full-scale sound stage used for commercial and student productions—20,000 square feet of unfinished space for start-ups. Most of the embryonic tech companies clustered in this cavernous, public-garage-Spartan room are unaffiliated with Flashpoint. (Tullman offers them only cheap rent and free advice.) An exception is Tap.Me, which manages the display of advertising in video games. Tap.Me's founders met and bonded while building an Xbox game at Flashpoint. Tullman hasn't invested but did drill the team on presenting to venture capitalists. It has so far raised $1.4 million.
Justin Moore, a co-founder of Tap.Me, is exactly the kind of student Tullman wants to attract. He graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering but, finding no careers that interested him, enrolled at Flashpoint in its first year, hoping for a fresh start. "I loved it," says Moore. "I learned different stuff than I did at MIT: interpersonal skills, team-management skills, communication skills. At MIT, it was, How do you formulate solutions to problems? Flashpoint was, How do you organize and get people together to actually execute? And just seeing it as a new business in action, I got really jazzed up to start my own."
Tullman expects start-ups like Tap.Me will provide projects for Flashpoint students and also, someday, employment for graduates. Another potential employer is the quasi-incubator Hydrbox, which so far consists of Tullman, a developer, and 15 product ideas Tullman came up with while he was busy not sleeping. They include a cool technology that lets T-shirts transmit messages to mobile phones and a mechanism for managing information using your subconscious that Tullman patiently went over with me three times and I still didn't get. Tullman plans to see which innovations gain traction and then hire sales teams around them, while keeping administration and research and development centralized. "We're essentially rapid prototyping new businesses," he says.
Tullman thinks some of the technologies percolating in Hydrbox are potentially substantial companies, which he might lead at the same time as Flashpoint or possibly after it. When he launched the school, Tullman estimated he would stay seven years. That means he has three to go. He likes to move on, and then on, and then on, which he concedes may be why he is not better known. "I prefer to expand and enhance and enrich what the business is doing rather than continue to build above a certain level," he says. "A lot of famous CEOs run public companies, and I can tell you it was not fun to run a public company the times I've done that. I wouldn't even want to sit on the board of a public company."
I ask him if he's happy, and he shrugs off the question: "There's a word, anhedonic, that fits me," he says. "I'm doing important and worthwhile work. I'm pleased with what I've accomplished. There are moments of exuberance. But I would never say I am happy.
"I live to try and figure out how to be most productive," he continues. "The question to ask, every minute of your life, is, 'Is what I am doing moving something forward? Is it advancing me? Is it advancing something important?' If not, it may not be a good use of my time."
