Courtesy Ward 8 Studios.

It’s a video the cynical person is predisposed to hate: People dancing to Pharrell’s ubiquitous hit “Happy” on the streets of Washington.

But something about it — the sunny looks on the dancers’ faces, the use of locations off the National Mall — made it undeniably, well, great. As DCist commenter Fugitive Vizsla said, “This is commenter kryptonite, I can’t even find mean things to say about the tourists. Ugh.”

The production company behind the video, Ward 8 Studios, is based out of The Hive 2.0 in Anacostia. Alex Cox, who recently founded the company with his college roommate Omid Heidari and girlfriend Susan Moon, says the video “has no agenda,” adding they didn’t make it thinking it would get a lot of views. (It’s been seen over 21,000 times, as of today.) “We used it as a way to test the waters,” he says. “Would people be receptive to something more in the joyful category?”

Indeed, showing the positive side of neighborhoods traditionally ignored, misrepresented or portrayed negatively by mass media is part of Ward 8 Studios’ goal.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say the media has a negative slant toward east of the [Anacostia] River, but most people don’t think of [it] as a livable place, especially newcomers,” Cox says. “I thought it would be cool to have a media source based in Ward 8 that is giving a positive story about what’s happening east of the River.”

Cox, originally from Northern California and educated at Pepperdine, moved to College Park, where his cousin lived, in 2007. He and Moon made the move to Anacostia in July 2013 after exploring D.C. neighborhoods they hadn’t been to and learning of its positive qualities. Cox says Nikki Peele, the blogger behind Congress Heights on the Rise and a force behind The Hive and ARCH Development Corporation, encouraged the group to reach out to people and start making videos. And that’s what they’ve been doing.

Ward 8 Studios wants to “put a positive and fun spin on any projects we take on,” Cox says. “We’re already in the process of taking on some projects in places, mostly east of the River, that people don’t think of as fun and positive.”

“We just want to be a positive source of media,” he says, adding that they want to work for small local businesses anywhere in D.C. They’re already working on a video for business incubator The Hive and the Anacostia Arts Center, and are in the storyboarding process for a video for the Anacostia location of Martha’s Table.

They’re also planning to take a page from the popular Humans of New York project and create video clips of random people on the street. “We thought it’d be a cool way for people to see that wherever you go people are people,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s actually going to be anything meaningful for people, but it’s meaningful for us.”

When asked if he’s received any negative reaction after starting a business in Anacostia, Cox says close friends and people his own age have asked: “Why would you want to be there?”

“It’s sad to me because I’ve grown to really love it,” Cox says. “People just aren’t doing their time there. In the rest of D.C., people are coming through for internships or maybe military service or they work with a nonprofit and they’re a consultant or whatever. You get across the River and people live there, and they’ve been living there for generations. … You don’t see that in the news. In the news, you don’t know that if you go work in Anacostia, in a few weeks everyone will know who you are.”

On the flip side, Cox says everyone in the neighborhood “has been good to us” thus far.

“We just want to show people this is a great place.”