Scott McGibbon
Scott McGibbon is Project Specialist at the Norman Lear Center.
On my recent L.A.-bound vacation, I took the time to check out a Web site I'd had my eye on for months: hitRECord.org , a supremely cool, online collaborative media-making venture started by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It seems to have reached a happy and coherent critical mass lately (I was a bit confused when I first stumbled upon it), most deliciously expressed in a whimsical live action/animated short, Morgan & Destiny's Eleventeenth Date "The Zeppelin Zoo." Aside from the Lewis Carrollish narration and visual razzle-dazzle, what's so remarkable about this film? The credits. Wait for them, because you'll discover that there were 306 online collaborators (58 musicians, 54 actors, 95 visual artists, 95 animal creators and 4 digital engineers) who contributed ideas, music and images and then helped re-shape and remix the film into its finished state.
hitRECord looks like another big step in connected culture, standing on the shoulders of The Elephant's Dream, the world's first so-called "open" movie, which was made solely using open source graphics software, and with all production files freely available to all contributors.
And the late, lamented Remix America , developed by Norman Lear, ran in this same creative stream of "let's remix stuff together and make something amazing" and included online historical clips and video-editing tools. hitRECord.org doesn't feature those tools and it's probably for the best, offering more freedom to contributing artists to work with their own clips and editing tools.
What a smart and shrewd way to get something creative going, especially in a town that enjoys crushing creativity much more than nurturing it. While the site has produced only short films so far, Gordon-Levitt claims to have his eyes open for hitRECord projects that could be developed into feature films.
And there's something really radical in the not-so-fine print: profit-sharing. For hitRECord projects that become monetized (shown at film festivals, included in anthologies) the company splits profits 50/50 after costs with all contributors. Apparently they're already sending out checks. (Don't tell Jack Klugman, who I believe is still trying to collect profit-participation money owed to him from his 1970s Universal show Quincy.)
But what I like most is that hitRECord takes user-generated content far beyond pop song lip-syncs, lame parodies and, oh, they're so cute! pets. Hey, Hollywood, here's a win/win method to surface new talent. Maybe -- I hope -- new stories, genres and superhero-free movies will bubble up from this bright endeavor. I'm going to throw my artistic chops into the mix. Why don't you?
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