About HITRECORD - HITRECORD
About HITRECORD
Joe
Hey everyone, Joe Gordon-Levitt here, welcome to HITRECORD, and thanks for coming!
My brother, dan, and I started this little corner of the Internet long ago. What began as a creative outlet for me and my videos and songs and stories soon evolved into a hub of collaboration for a community full of people who love making all kinds of art together.
What’s going on here: Art for art’s sake. Because creativity is good for the soul. No, I don’t believe in souls. Well, I guess it depends how you define the term. In any case…
Anybody can join the HITRECORD community. We make videos, stories, songs, visual art, and of course, more! So whether you like writing, acting, filmmaking, music, drawing, photography, or whatever else, there are people here making stuff you might want to collaborate on.
Or even if you don’t fancy yourself an “artist” per sé, this is me giving you the go-ahead to jump in anyway. Part of the spirit here has always been not to worry too much, and just give it a try.
Getting started: Here are a few ways —
Projects: There are tons of projects you can contribute to. Some of them are super easy, some are quite challenging, and everything in between. Click here to see some of the more active projects at the moment.
Remix: You can also find a piece of art you like, and remix it. Remix is a big part of our community’s culture, and it just means taking something someone else has done and making it into something new, building off of it, sampling it, revising it, reimagining it. Everything everyone posts here is up for grabs for remix, and we always give credit where credit is due. (If you don’t want your art remixed, all good, but best not to post it here.) You can start browsing through art you might want to remix on the Community page, or the Explore page.
Following people: You can start following some people, check out their art, make some friends, strike up a conversation in the comments, and see where it goes from there. To start, here’s a list of our community curators, who are all awesome people, and great artists. And here is a list of community moderators, who are especially outstanding members of the community that are here to help guide you through your experience here on HITRECORD by answering any questions you may have along the way. My bet is, the more you hang out here, the sooner you’ll start jumping in with your own creativity.
Push the button: Or, you can just post some of your own art too. Hit the big red button up there.
Watch this video: Quick little intro about how it’s easier to get creative when you don’t have to do it alone.
What does HITRECORD mean:
I first started saying the words “hit record” to myself a looong time ago, back in the mid 2000s. I had been acting since I was six years old, I’d quit for a while to go to college, and when I tried to get back into it, I couldn’t get a part. Which felt really, really shitty. It’s painful when you have the urge to be creative, but you feel like something’s stopping you. Maybe you know the feeling?
At that point, “hit record” was just a little personal rallying cry I’d repeat over and over. Encouraging myself to stop waiting for someone to cast me in their movie. To take responsibility for my own creative outlet. I liked the symbol of the round red REC button, and hitting it became a metaphor for getting started, taking the plunge, overcoming self-doubt, expressing myself, making art.
And yes, it was also a bit of wordplay, commenting on how new media technology was changing art and creativity. A hit record was an object to be consumed, but to hit record is a proactive creative process. My belief and hope was that new technology would make the media less about a small exclusive industry selling its wares to a world of passive couch potato consumers, and more about a radically inclusive ecosystem of mass participation.
Other community things:
Like most communities, we have a bit of a shorthand with each other —
RECords: Video, audio, image, text, we call them all RECords. You could call it art, you could call it content (I wish the word content hadn’t come to mean this). Much like hitting the REC button is our metaphor for getting started on any kind of creativity, a RECord is our catch-all word to describe what you made.
Remixes: Like I said above, any time you use someone else’s RECord to make something new, we call that a remix.
Resources: Resources are the RECords you’ve used in your remix. In a community where we’re always remixing each other, it’s really important to give credit where credit is due. So we always cite our Resources.
Core Values: I’m really proud of the positive culture of our community, and a few years ago we collaboratively wrote these nine tenets of what we believe in, and how we strive to conduct ourselves. Check them out here.
A brief history:
Armed with my new motivational metaphor, “hit record”, I flipped Hollywood the bird, and started making a bunch of art on my own. In 2005, my brother helped me set up the first version of the website which just had a few links to download a couple videos I’d made. It looked like this:
I would post new stuff from time to time, and it was fun. Then, in 2007, dan suggested we put a message board on the website, so people could post their own stuff and talk to each other. At first, I didn’t like the idea. Even back then, the Internet could be a nasty place. I didn’t want nastiness on my site. He said we should try it, and if it sucked, we could take it down. Hard to argue with that.
Message board: We set up the message board, and to my pleasant surprise, people were cool! But that wasn’t even the biggest surprise. While some people were posting on the message board about my art, and some people were posting their own art, what neither dan nor I expected was another behavior entirely… People started making art together. The collaborations were very simple at first. But it was really something.
It sounds obvious now, people collaborating on the Internet. But back in 2007, it was fairly novel. The notion that one person in Nebraska would be collaborating on a piece of art with another person in the Philippines, having never physically met. I sorta took up the role of ringleader, and started experimenting with what kind of creative collaborations we could do. My brother started hacking the pre-fab message board software to make our collaborations more organized. And things evolved from there.
Production company: After a couple years of this, I started having conversations with my old friend, Jared Geller, about how we could apply this online community’s creative process to more ambitious projects. And in 2010, we launched HITRECORD as an open collaborative production company. We went on to play our short films at Sundance, publish books, put out records, go on tour, partner with massive brands and impactful nonprofits, even win two Emmys for two different shows we made together. A number of these productions made money, and we came up with a thorough and transparent system for paying contributing artists. (We don’t do commercial productions these days, but if you're curious about how it worked, watch this.) It was never about the money though. It was always about opening up art and creativity.
Here’s one of the short films we made for our Emmy-winning TV show, HITRECORD on TV. I think it’s a good example of what can happen when you open up the creative process to a wider variety of artists:
Start-up: In the last several years, we became focused on how to make HITRECORD even more inclusive. As a production company, our collaborative projects were open to anybody, but not everybody’s contributions would be used in the final TV show, book, record, etc. We wanted our site to be a place where anybody and everybody could have a meaningful creative experience. One thing we’d often hear from community members was that they had a desire to participate, but didn’t feel they had the necessary skills. So we decided to build a way to use our communal creative process for learning.
Learning: We launched Class Projects in the fall of 2021. It was our HITRECORD-y version of online learning, and it was all about Learning By Doing. This piqued the interest of David Rogier, who’d been a good friend and mentor for years, and is also the founder/CEO of MasterClass. Earlier this year, Jared and I, along with a bunch of the HITRECORD staff joined MasterClass, where we get to continue our mission of opening up the creative process on a grander stage than we ever have before.
Full circle: Now HITRECORD has sorta come back to its roots as an informal community making art together for the love of it. My brother died in 2010, so he saw our little site just start to take off as a production company, and I know he would be ecstatic about everything we’ve all accomplished together. And I also think he’d be extra happy to see us returning to the mode in which he spent the most time with it. It certainly makes me feel close to him to have this place still going, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone in our community for making that happen every day.
So, come have a look around. Check out some of the art this awesome community has made together. Remix somebody’s RECord. Jump in on somebody’s project. Or start your own. The round red REC button awaits. Are you recording?
Thanks again <3
J
#tags
about hitrecord
joseph gordon-levitt
dan
history
jared geller
community
community core values
learning
start-up
production company
projects
message board
website
resources
remix
creativity
hit record
introduction video
getting started