BY: CAROLINE ROLF
Have you ever come up with what is surely the most brilliant idea ever imagined without the means to pull it off? Maybe it was creating a short film about chinchillas vacationing in Mexico or writing down what you remember from Friday night. The human mind is full of ideas, but because of a lack of resources or an appropriate platform, rarely do we follow through with them. This is where a collaborative Internet platform would come in handy.
Part workshop, part social network and part art exhibition, hitRECord.org is a hybrid production endeavour that taps into the constituent’s creativity. This platform challenges traditional ideas of artistic ownership, communication and the process of art production. The director of this project, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, invites users to collaborate with his team and each other in the creative process of filmmaking, music recording, screenwriting and animating amongst other art forms. The goal is to a create cohesive and polished vision that will gain attention outside the creative space. In the past, Gordon-Levitt has sent some finished projects to Sundance and South by Southwest.
Joseph, hitRECord Joe, or regular Joe as he introduces himself to the hitRECord community, has been devoted to his television show HitRecord on TV since its launch in 2014. He first shared a tweet with fans on the series’ official twitter account to inform fans about the new project. He wrote, “Big news! The site’s going into maintenance mode around 4am PST so we can start moving everything into our new site. Stay tuned for more!” A few hours later he tweeted, “Heading to bed thinking about launch tomorrow. Been working towards this a looooooong time..” Based on a mantra Joe enacted for his own life, “Just hit record, just do it,” this new chapter of creativity is now a professional and well-organized collective for artists.
HitRECord is less about the individual showcasing their work and more about a community making a product together. The 500 Days of Summer actor encourages users to visit the “Challenges” page for inspiration on where to get started. The mini challenges are organized by interests like cinematography, design, editing and so on. Anybody can issue a challenge, which is especially useful if you have a work in progress and need the community to help, or if you want to apply your skills but are without an idea, this page is the place to go. Related challenges are organized and put towards the completion of a final piece that have the opportunity to be distributed, published or otherwise monetized, like a live event. Most notably, for every monetized production, all artists and contributors are paid for their hard work. So if you want to push the record button, let your creativity flow and receive a cheque signed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, then go ahead and visit hitrecord.org.
You can learn more from Joe’s video here.
Image sourcing: takepart.com, hitrecord.org, facebook.com
