In today’s world everything can be shared instantaneously through social media, making everything more accessible and starting a new wave of entertainment and media sourcing. At the head of that wave are websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, on which artists can freely contribute whatever they create for the viewing pleasure of audiences around the globe. The sheer number of artists present on these websites has created a vast community, some of whom interact and collaborate with each other to produce even better videos than before.
But, there is an organisation that not many have heard of that is utilising this idea of collaboration and taking it to a whole new level. Joseph Gordon-Levitt started his open, collaborative production company ‘HitRECord‘ in 2010 where they started by producing short collaborative films which were screened at film festivals such as the Sundance film festival. As Gordon-Levitt himself puts it, an open, collaberative production company is, “open, meaning anyone can contribute, collaborative meaning we use the internet to work on our projects together, and production company because that’s what we do.”
The first season of HitRECord on TV! won a Primetime Emmy and an Emmy for ‘Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Social TV Experience’. The TV show, through its collaborative and mix of styles is a new version of the variety show in the age of social media. The first episode, ‘RE: the Number One’ was first aired on YouTube before it was aired on television and contained work from 426 contributors:
The show, like most vloggers and bloggers of social media, is also unafraid to tackle vital issues on the headlines of newspapers such as this call out for contributions regarding feminism:
Other topics explored include fantasy, trash, space and money, among others. Even though the other episodes in the list don’t seem to cover topical issues, each episode goes in depth on its topic, exploring every possible avenue it can, such as in the first episode above where they bring light to the honey mushroom, a singular organism that is so large it is destroying every tree that stands in its way in the forest it occupies.
HitRECord is only one of many entities that use community collaboration to create some truly amazing artistic creations, and thanks to the internet and social networking sites, collaborative art works are more and more possible to create, not just within a network of peers, but globally too.