viz.

Image Credit: RoseVallentine

I teach a class about the new rhetoric of internet commerce. I have my students write a standard rhetorical analysis paper around the middle of the term, and for their primary texts I ask them to use the digital marketing materials of dotcoms. Of all the paper genres I assign (expository, persuasive, etc.) rhetorical analysis is generally my favorite. I prefer these papers because I'm a literary critic, and rhetorical analyses are essentially close readings that use a standard rhetorical methodology.  But there's another reason I especially enjoyed reading my students' analysis papers this semester: they introduced me to several fantastic websites that I didn't know about before. I feel compelled to share one of these sites with viz. readers because of its novel interventions in visual culture. (And I want to thank my student, who I will refrain from naming, for the great find!).  The company is called hitRECord, an open, online platform for collaborative filmmaking and other artistic expression.

The novelty of the business concept is that it enables creative individuals to combine their talents through a transparent, user-controlled process, instead of having to adapt their ideas, writing, acting, etc. to the demands of a traditional production company.  If users work on a project together and it turns a profit, half of the proceeds go to hitREcord and half are paid to people on the team.   It may come as a surprise that the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, famous for his roles in mainstream features like Ten Things I Hate About You, is the man behind this decidedly un-Hollywood-like venture. But Gordon-Levitt is not just the site's celebrity mascot (despite what appears to be an ironic appeal to his celebrity status on the website's main page).

Image Credit: Screenshot of hitrecord.org

The founder is an active participant on the website's discussion boards, a guest performer in some of the short films, and the bubbly personality of HitRECord's Youtube channel, where the company broadcasts its massive casting calls and solicits all kinds of original, user-generated material.

Video Credit: Youtube video by hitrecord.org

After watching a few of hitRECord's video prompts, like the one entitled "RE: Flickering Lights" (above), I was struck by their pedagogical aims and procedures. The initial project that Gordon-Levitt highlights in this video--a compilation of poetry, original music, and a thematic series of shots--is analogous to the first draft of a student project. Gordon-Levitt talks about this mashup as if he is a teacher urging his students to develop their ideas. "While I really like his edit and I think it's really good, I think that we can take it a step further," he says.  Later on in the clip, after he sets the parameters for revising and amplifying the flickering light piece, Gordon-Levitt brings in a cinematographer to give viewers a short tutorial on how to capture high quality footage of flickering lights.  The instructional aspect of these videos reminds me of the trend in education across subject areas torward MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and video instruction of all kinds.  It also occured to me as I was watching that assignment prompts of any nature, though especially for creative projects, could be made way more engaging (and comprehensible?) if they were delivered in video form. It might also be a good idea to approach them as if they were a casting call, or call for submissions.

Image Credit: Youtube video by hitrecord.org

My final comments are in reference to a video called "Iterations" (above), which was created by several hitRECord collaborators and released days ago with support from Levi's. The caption posted with the film on Youtube explains that "ITERATIONS tells the coming of age story of a girl's sometimes difficult and sometimes reluctant path to adulthood." But some of the song lyrics--"I'm an experiment, each trial is a test, constant recalibration. I am recycled cells, I learn to like myself...all disjointed, my file corrupted"--suggest that the story may also be about the process of assembling a digital art project, and the challenge/futility/thrill of making an artistic unity from multiple "disjointed" standpoints. I wonder if the handmade, stitched look of the images in this film, along with the fact that many of the hitRECord's film projects involve animation, may be attributed to the crowdsourced origin of their production. Do crowdsourced films have different aesthetic and generic features than their traditional counterparts? Is one of the main differences that the crowdsourced kind cultivate or exhibit a patchworked sensibility?  I'm not sure, but I'm interested to see what new frontiers the artists at hiRECord discover together.