While “Inception” may have been the blockbuster of the summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt made an impression on Bruins long before that. His talk tonight at Ackerman Grand Ballroom, hosted by UCLA Campus Events Commission, has sold out nearly 1000 seats and brought out fans of “10 Things I Hate About You” and “(500) Days of Summer” alike.
The 29-year old actor comes to UCLA tonight to talk about his production company hitrecord.org which allows artists from all over to contribute and collaborate on video productions.
According to Daniel Soto, CEC speakers director and a third-year geography and environmental studies student, tickets for the event sold out two hours after the Central Ticket Office (CTO) opened on Wednesday, Nov. 3. The 100 tickets released the following morning were gone in 15 minutes.
Welcome to our first ever live blogging event. Leave comments and questions below or tweet us @DailyBruinAE.
Update Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s talk at UCLA is the first stop on his “RE:Acting & RECording — a college tour.” He will be visiting schools in Los Angeles in New York throughout November.
Update 5:30 p.m. Leading the line on Ackerman’s first floor patio are Hillary Williams, first-year undeclared humanities student, and Lauren Gennawey, a second-year English and political science student, who were also the first to get their tickets on Wednesday morning. Williams and Gennawey said they lined up outside CTO at 5:30 a.m. because they didn’t want to risk missing out on seeing Gordon-Levitt. They weren’t alone as others joined them at 6 a.m.
“By the time we got there it was still dark out, so it felt like we were camping,” Gennawey said.
Williams, who said her favorite Gordon-Levitt movie is “500 Days of Summer,” said she doesn’t know what she’d do if she was able to meet him.
“I don’t want to be one of those girls that screams, but it just might happen,” Williams said.
Update 7:55p.m. Sound check has wrapped, a slideshow of hitrecord.org is playing and the 1000 empty chairs are half-way filled as students continue to file in through the back doors of Ackerman Grand Ballroom.
Update 8:25 p.m. Ackerman’s filled to capacity and it’s almost time to begin. Kelsey Sharpe, a third-year English student has been in line since 5:30 p.m. and has been a member of hitrecord.org for two months.
“I’m hoping this will encourage me to put something on it,” Sharpe said. Sharpe, who waited in line with her friend Brian Flannigan, a third-year political sciences student, and said that the wait for tonight’s show wasn’t too bad because the line was in good spirit.
“We made some new friends over our mutual love for movies,” said Sharpe.
Update 8:40 p.m. Without any introduction, Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes to the stage with a video camera pointed at the audience. The audience breaks into cheers as he pans the room with the camera recording.
“That’s perfect, I’m leaving,” said Gordon-Levitt before proceeding to tell members of the audience to keep their cameras and phones on for the duration of the event. Photos and recordings during the show will be uploaded on to laptops in the back of the room to be used as a part of hitrecord.org projects.
Tweets with the hash tag “hitrecorducla” will be used throughout the event to select questions by audience members.
Fun fact: Gordon-Levitt’s mother and late brother, Dan Gordon-Levitt, both attended UCLA.
Update 8:50 p.m. First hash tagged tweet selected by Joseph Gordon-Levitt from his phone:
monicalovestrs: No work of art is done alone. What we create is a reflection of social construction and how we see the world, @hitrecordjoe.#hitrecorducla
The tweet leads to a conversation on writing and the state of mind while writing.
Update 9:10 p.m. Screening of Morgan and Destiny’s Eleventeeth Date – The Zeppelin Zoo, a collaboration created on hitrecord.org which screened at South by Southwest film festival 2010.
Gordon-Levitt proceeds to describe the process of how the film was made from initial drawings (or “doodles”) by Jennifer Maria, a hitrecord.org contributor, a short story written by Sarah Daly, another member of hitrecord.org, a score with numerous hitrecord.org musicians lending their sound and live acting and voice overs by Gordon-Levitt himself.
“It started as something where just I put up videos, but now it’s become a collaborative sounding board,” Gordon-Levitt said.
Gordon-Levitt said that in 2010 hitrecord.org evolved because of the move from a collaborative community to a professional production company.
“If my goal was to make money, I certainly wouldn’t be here,” Gordon-Levitt said. “I’d be producing a reality TV show.”
Update 9:25 Screening of a recent hitrecord.org project entitled and a new earth.
Third hash tagged tweet selected in response to fact that contributors to hitrecord.org have the opportunity to make money based on their contribution.
jules_su: Could sending the artists money make it ALL about the money? History shows it does. Paving the road to hell #hitrecorducla
Gordon-Levitt said there is a danger that giving artist money for their contribution can cause creative problems and that, in traditional hollywood, when there is a bad movie it is because the focus was on the money.
“Make something for me, put it up there, I’ll sell it,” Gordon-Levitt said in response to conversation with “jules-su” about writing.
Update 9:35 The event has just gone live. Gordon-Levitt and his team bring the hitrecord.org home page up on Ackerman Grand Ballroom’s projection screen and begin recording an actual record. A record is what a single contribution (video, drawing, written work, etc.) uploaded on hitrecord.org is called.
“Dan went to college here, so these are all the cool kids,” Gordon-Levitt said for the recording.
(For those that want to check out the record, it will be posted on the hitrecord.org site as “RE: Art Questions.”)
Update 9:50 p.m. Showing of a work-in-progress entitled “Everything Is On Fire.” According to Gordon-Levitt this is a project that is still in need of a video editor and is being shown to give UCLA students an idea of the projects that they can contribute to.
Now showing “The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories” which is a project where contributors create short stories that can then be turned into full videos by other hitrecord.org members. The audience response to both of the 30 second tiny stories is the largest to any films shown tonight. (Forbidden Love and Dear Flower)
Gordon-Levitt finished the evening by introducing the song Nebulullaby created by his friend Sean Lennon and Lennon’s writing partner Kemp Muhl, of the band “The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger.” The video features contributions of images and videos of people sleeping by hitrecord.org members. Gordon-Levitt said the project is in need of more images of sleeping people and is another opportunity for UCLA students to become involved.
Update 10 p.m. And that’s all she wrote. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has left the building. Or at the very least, he’s left Ackerman Grand Ballroom. Thanks for tuning in for our first live blogging.
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