60 THE QUEENS COURIER • BUZZ • APRIL 24, 2014 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT www.queenscourier.com Photos courtesy of Lawrence Becker (Above) This behind-thescenes shot shows the creation of the winning Vine, with fake snow on a glass layer over Becker’s original video. FLEX SPENDING Use it or lose it! SPRING INTO SAVINGS ONSITE DOCTORS • EYE EXAMS • CONTACTS • 1 HOUR SERVICE • VISION PLANS ACCEPTED • SUNGLASSES • LOWEST PRICES 2 PAIR OF EYEGLASSES QC QC QC $99 Includes: EYE EXAM, Frames & Lenses Select frames with clear plastic, single vision lenses+/- 4 sph., 2 cyl. Not valid with any other offers, sales, vision plans or packages. Must present prior to purchase. Offer valid at this location only. Offer ends: 5/24/14 NO-LINE BIFOCAL EYEGLASSES $99 Includes: EYE EXAM, No-Line Bifocal Lenses & Frame Select frame with select clear plastic no-line bifocal lenses +/- 4 sph., 2 cyl up to 2.50 add. Not valid with any other offers, sales, vision plans or packages. Must present prior to purchase. 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Offer expires: 5/24/14 buzz Ridgewood stop-motion animator wins Tribeca #6SecFilms competition BY KATRINA MEDOFF Vine, a mobile app that allows users to create and share six-second looping videos, didn’t exist until January 2013 — but now, thanks to the app, Ridgewood resident Lawrence Becker, 32, is creating stop-motion videos full time. And now, the stop-motion animator has been recognized by the Tribeca Film Festival as one of the winners of the second annual #6SecFilms competition. “I heard about the contest the year before, when they had the same contest, but I was late to it — I heard about it when it was already over,” Becker said. “This year, I jumped on it.” More than 530 submissions were narrowed down by Tribeca Film Festival programmers, who presented a short list to the jury. The jury then chose winners from each category. Becker won a meeting with GrapeStory, which is an agency that connects Viners to companies, but “the best prize is being able to call myself a Tribeca Film Fest winner from now on,” he said. Becker’s fi lm, “The Vortex Finds a Host,” won the “genre” category of the competition. “I submitted a bunch of fi lms to ‘animation’ — that’s what I primarily do,” Becker said. But, luckily, “I also submitted to ‘genre,’ because many of my fi lms have a fantasy/sci-fi quality to them.” Becker’s winning Vine depicts a giant, living snowman turned-vortex of snow fi ltering into his mouth. “With all the snow we had this winter, I started going out and playing in the snow, just kind of experimenting with snow animation, and it just slowly started turning into a fi lm,” Becker said. To create the fi lm, Becker took footage of himself out in the snow at McCarren Park in Williamsburg. “I take footage out in the snow and make a fool out of myself in public because I’m acting with things that aren’t there,” he said. He then put that video on a fl at screen monitor and laid it down horizontally under multiple layers of glass on which he animated “snow” made of Styrofoam and baking powder. Becker explained that the multiple layers of glass created a 3-D effect: “It’s how Walt Disney used to do his animating,” with a character on one layer and the background on other layers, he said. “The Vortex Finds a Host” is just part of a short fi lm, which will end up being around a minute and a half to two minutes long when completed. Another of Becker’s snow animations, which made it into the list of runners-up, is the beginning of the longer fi lm. “You see a snowball burst like a planet blowing up,” Becker described. Becker started creating Vines a year ago, in April 2013, and has turned it into a career. He now creates animations for companies such as ESPN, Bud Light, Tillamook Cheese, Sony’s “Astronauts Wanted,” the Food Network and Coca-Cola Co. “They all keep rolling in,” Becker said, since Vines are very popular right now. His big break came when he hosted one of social media news site Mashable’s weekly Vine contests (his week’s theme was Star Wars Mashups, and he himself created a themed Vine). ESPN took notice and contacted him, and he’s worked consistently since then. Stop-motion animation has always been a passion of Becker’s and “since I was a kid, it was what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. “Vine got me there.”
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