to drink a lot of bourbon and stay up late

The title quote was made by Lauren Bacall. It comes from the founding of the Rat Pack – when asked by columnist Earl Wilson what the purpose of the group was, Bacall responded “to drink a lot of bourbon and stay up late.” ref: wikipedia

Today I spent several hours with the University of Ulster Interactive Media Arts Second Year students who were finishing up a two week ‘in-house” placement within the university and working on projects related to Digital Circle: some code4pizza projects and also the formation of an initial showreel for the upcoming SxSW Interactive trade mission.

Over the 10 days, the students were joined variously by Paul Malone (PaperJam Design), Stuart Mackey (PaperBag Ltd), Stuart Mallett (Mac-Sys Ltd) and Bertrand Lassallette-Desnault (Supernova Productions). Each of these folk works in a different part of the digital content industry and had some views (sometimes conflicting) for the students.

When I first met these students I wasted all of my good joke material early as I was keen to get some sort of response from them – and there wasn’t much of a response. Today though, I saw a group of entirely different minds. I had waxed lyrical about how they needed to develop their portfolio, about how their attitude was the deciding factor between working in a great job or a McJob, about how they didn’t need anyones permission to be inspired.

I’m really happy with everything I saw today. I saw redesigns and rebranding for Code4Pizza, web site designs, app user interfaces, heads buried in XCode, hand drawn art, short (but amazing) paper-based pinball animations, stop motion, vector art and, best of all, some real enthusiasm for the subject.

We finished today with a talk that started in the classroom and ended in the car and ranged from Secret Cinema to Cut-up Technique, Building Projections to the Graffiti Research Lab. That, the conversation that comes from collective enthusiasm, is the best place to be.