Kim Raff/Getty Images for Sundance Film Festival
Collaborative entertainment is moving fast into the mainstream and with actor, director, writer Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s new show, HitRecord on TV, which premiered the first three episodes at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT, last week, the future of entertainment will never be the same.
While Gordon-Levitt is also well-known for his acting in hits like Looper, (500) Days of Summer, and Don Jon (which he also wrote and directed), he’s been working on a collaborative collection of entertainment online (which he launched with his brother) since 2005. People can submit anything from lyrics to music, animated shorts, dances, mini movies, and answers to specific questions that he poses to his online community. From the hundreds of submissions, Gordon-Levitt and his team structure an entire half-hour TV series made of a multitude of pieces based on a call-out to fans on various themes, i.e. Front Lawn Freaks where people send in their clips on freaking out on the front lawn. From what’s been done so far, this is the new version of great entertainment.
HitRecord on TV premiered on Pivot TV on January 19, 2014, and was available of course, less than 24 hours later in full on YouTube. The show taps into what today’s savvy new generation of DIY entertainment makers are all about. Utilizing the fact that more people now have access to share their stories, images, music, and recordings, HitRecord.org and on TV provide an ideal community-driven platform for creatives. Or as Gordon-Levitt puts it, for those who may not actually think they are creative, but actually do have something to contribute.
HitRecord is an ongoing phenomenon which started with a handful of community followers. They also have produced 3 hardback volumes of Tiny Stories anthologies, vinyl records of shared, crowdsourced music, and premiered films at Sundance. HitRecord, in essence, is a complete mash-up of community-supplied entertainment for a YouTube-driven generation that’s keen on open-sourced collaborations.
The first theme centered around the number “One.” In it, is a short featuring Elle Fanning who is a girl with night blindness who’s Dad gets her night goggles to see the stars. The show features a hilarious animation on music, the largest living organism in Utah, and ends with a song (One Song) that Gordon-Levitt created from a variety of sources, which he then plays with his band (on piano) and sings.
At Sundance, Gordon-Levitt recalled first debuting HitRecord at New Frontier and how Robert Redford’s film festival can foster great dreams. He respectfully gave praise to Redford and said, “In our wildest dreams we hope that decades from now, we’ll be nurturing artists like Sundance has nurtured us.”
Gordon-Levitt sees HitRecord on TV growing even larger with more “TV shows, features, documentaries, and bigger live events.” He said he hoped HitRecord could even become his generation’s Dreamworks: “I think we could get there eventually. I think the future is bright.”
Watch the first episode here.
Stay tuned for more from Sundance Film Festival 2014.
