I had the pleasure yesterday to get a tour of Flashpoint Academy from Howard Tullman, Flashpoint’s President/CEO. Flashpoint is a new two-year school for digital arts. They teach recording arts, visual effect and animation, game development, and film and broadcast.

To say that their facilities in downtown Chicago are state-of-the-art is an understatement. They are amazing. (And to top it off, Howard Tullman has his spectacular art collection lining the walls.)

Flashpoint is an outgrowth of a realization that not everyone wants or needs four-year colleges and that digital arts is, as Howard said, “the last meritocracy” where it doesn’t matter what you look like or how you did in school. If you can edit or animate or build games or make a movie, you can succeed.

The other thing that impressed me about Flashpoint was that they do not simply do student work and then send people out for internships. Their second half of the second year is spent working on real projects, in school. So each student graduates with a portfolio of real work.

Flashpoint graduates their first class this May and I think we can say for certain that we can expect great things from them and from the classes that follow.

Link [Flashpoint Academy]