Creating art with other people is one of the greatest pleasures of filmmaking if you’re working with a team and not all by yourself. The joy of doing something together that will be seen by an eventual audience is one of the highlights of our trade and the chance to showcase the work is an essential driver of a moviemaker’s passion.

My admiration for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRECORD, an open collaborative production company that started as a website initiated by the actor/writer/director and his brother in 2005, couldn’t be higher. HitRECORD is a platform for interested creatives to join the site’s community and contribute to different projects, share their own ideas, or remix and use the work of other members to be part of something bigger. Content creators participate in fields such as writing, video editing, animation and various others.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his team garner the numerous submissions for each project and combine them to singular artistic achievements such as short films, which have already been shown at festivals like Sundance and TIFF and now have a new distribution platform through HitRECORD on TV.

With HitRECORD on TV, the new endeavour by the production company, Gordon-Levitt created a show for the recently launched TV network channel Pivot that combines short films, music performances and video submissions with the stage presence of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in front of a live audience to become a fast cut new kind of variety show for the media-savvy Web 2.0 generation. The first episode consists of submissions surrounding the theme “The number 1” and can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube, while subsequent editions will only be watchable via Pivot.

Part of this first episode is the short film First Stars I See Tonight, which stars Elle Fanning in a story based on the childhood memories of one of the community’s members and combines animation and green screen shot live action for a magical piece on the wonders around us.

The show, like the website itself, clearly benefits from Gordon-Levitt’s patronage and his ability to attract attention for the project. But of course the heart of HitRECORD lies in the participation of its members, who use their specific skills to create exciting work. As the closing song of the first episode, sung by born showman Gordon-Levitt and two of the community’s musicians on stage as well as a range of contributing artists, constitutes “You’re not the only one.”