Alan Becker

*Not to be confused with his in-series counterpart.*

*For the channel, see Alan Becker (YouTube Channel).*
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**Alan Becker** (born May 18, 1989) is an American animator and YouTuber. He is the creator of the *Animator vs. Animation* movies and the accompanying spin-off series AVM Shorts and AVA Shorts. He also appears on his side channel Animators VS Games where he plays various games with his friend *DJ Welch*, who's also an animator.

## Life and Career

Alan Becker was born on May 18, 1989 in Dublin, Ohio, alongside with his sister Harmony Becker, who is a cartoonist and an illustrator. He grew up living with his parents, sister, and unnamed brother.

Becker since his youth has been fascinated with the world of 2D traditional animation. Some of his favorite cartoon series included Looney Tunes and the short Daffy Duck short Duck Amuck which would later inspire the creation of his famous franchise *Animator vs. Animation*.

Growing up in a financially struggling family, Alan claimed that his family-owned merely one computer that was shared between him and his siblings. He only got limited access to the computer.

It was through this computer that he began experimenting with pixel art, beginning in 2001.

In 2005, he was home-schooled through an online training course which provided him with his first laptop. This laptop would motivate him to "experiment" with animations, and entered a course for Macromedia Flash to learn the topic in-depth. He began animating with Macromedia Flash (later Adobe Flash and currently Adobe Animate) After some time discovering the entertainment website Newgrounds, the first animation of his filmography ***Pink Army*** was produced.

### Early Years

Some time after the reception of ***Pink Army***, Becker animated the short ***Animator vs. Animation*** that depicted a stick figure fighting with its creator (noogai3) in an application on Windows. It was uploaded to Newgrounds on **June 6, 2006**, and earned 2nd place on the site the next morning.

Several website owners contacted Becker asking to host the animation on their website, one of which who offered $75 at the price of a contract that gave exclusive rights to the animation. Due to personal household struggles, Becker nearly signed the contract until **Steven Lerner** emailed him, warning him of the consequences if Becker were to follow through.

#### eBaum's World

The website eBaum's World hosted *Animator vs. Animation* without Becker's permission as a "*Weekly Best of the Web*" post(for which the site was infamous of doing too many other video creators). Steven Lerner and many other people at the time were on a legal campaign to fight against eBaum's World's theft of images/videos without permission of the content creator; including *Animator vs. Animation* as one of many victimized flash animations that fought with the case.

In a while, eBaum's World discovered that Becker was in contact with Lerner. Becker described his concern in the moment as, "getting paid for my work and keeping rights to my animation". The company compromised by offering $250 to host the animation, which he accepted. Afterwards, the site pressured him to create a testimonial that would restore the company's "tainted" image. Lerner later created a blog post that described Becker "selling" him out, and after ongoing conversations with Lerner, Becker returned the profits to demand eBaum's World remove the video and the testimonial from the site.

Becker's animation was found across the web, but had not received any formal credit or profits from it. **Atomfilms** (now CC Studios) approached Becker to fund the creation of a sequel known as ***Animator vs. Animation II***. It released on **November 4, 2006**. Within the animation, Alan Becker included his real AOL username, which ended up with him discontinuing his account there, due to massive amounts of text messages from strangers. **Charles Yeh** managed to contact Becker in the flooding spam to create a game based on the animation. The two collaborated to create *Animator vs. Animation: The Game*.

With YouTube beginning to trend in 2007, Becker wanted to begin to start uploading the series on the platform. However, other copies of the exact same animation were already uploaded there. Each of them had over a million views. After reporting these duplicates as copyright infringements, Alan was able to ascend the search results as an official content creator. The public demanded the release of a third film, described as the "epic finale" to the trilogy by ending the user's computer with a blue screen of death. It was meant to be a shelved series that helped Becker's attempt to pursue animation and get a career at Pixar Studios. However, the request to join their internship was denied for two years consecutively.

During his time in college, he created a variety of films with classmates, students and teachers that gave their own unique story and environment as seen with the short **Lumin** in **2013**.

### Animator vs. Animation Reboot

Alan Becker's professor and/or instructor **Thomas Richner** at *Columbia College of Arts and Design* advised that Becker move forward with the *Animator vs. Animation* series due to its large fanbase and unique potential, which values more than working professionally at a company. After his graduation, he started a kick-starter campaign to fund for a fourth film. After the release of *Animator vs. Animation IV* in **October 2, 2014**, his subscriber count grew to over one-hundred thousand. The large exponential increase of followers gave motivation to create another movie that came to be *Animation vs. Minecraft* which put him at one million in less than a month. Unlike the previous four films, outsourced labor was used this movie forward.

Two years later, Becker began production on ***Animation vs. YouTube*** that required him to contact thousands of other content creators on YouTube such as *PewDiePie*, *Smosh* and *Zach King*. It was delayed due to his personal life events, one of which included his marriage and first child. It reached public audiences on **August 3, 2017**.

On **November 18, 2017**, Becker debuted a pilot short which became the AVM Series. Midway through Season 1, he announced a second series AVA Shorts which revolves around the return of the Chosen One and Dark Lord, antagonists of the original trilogy. For the fourth and sixteenth episodes of the *AVM Shorts* series, Becker commissioned **Aaron Grooves** for the special note block music.

In **November 29, 2019**, Alan Becker announced he now has his own tutorial series (in collaboration with Bloop Animation) that goes in-depth with the entire process of how each of the episodes/movies are made and includes an exclusive animation that is inspired by *Animator vs. Animation*.

He has a second channel called Alan Becker tutorials in which he shared tutorials and Animation Flash. It is Currently Inactive.

Alan is married to an author of Mochi Magic and a cook specializing in Japanese cuisine, Kaori in February 10, 2010. Alan made an announced on July 27, 2017 that he became a father.

## Alan Becker's YouTube Channels

### Alan Becker

**Alan Becker** is Alan's main channel, being the home of the Animator vs. Animation Franchise as well as other animations made by him.

### AlanBeckerTutorials

**AlanBeckerTutorials** is a channel in which Alan shows some Flash Tutorials. This channel is currently inactive.
It was created on September 26th, 2011.

### AlanBeckerMinecraft

**AlanBeckerMinecraft** is a channel in which Alan plays Minecraft. As he is now more focusing on his new Server, AlanBeckerMC (abbreviated as ABMC). The project and channel is now held by one of the admins of his another server, Ghiblicraft. He is still owning the server partially as the Ghiblicraft team has decided to separate ABMC and Ghiblicraft.
It was created on December 9th, 2013.

### Animators VS Games

**Animators VS Games** is a channel where Alan Becker and his friend DJ Welch play many different games. They have collaborated with TheOdd1sOut, Skip the Tutorial, Jaiden Animations, and many other YouTubers. This channel is currently very active!
It was created on August 20th, 2018.

### Alan Becker Clips

This channel cuts parts of his videos into YouTube Shorts clips.
It was created on March 19th, 2021.

### Alan Plays

**Alan Plays** is a music channel of Alan playing the otamatone. It is currently inactive.
It was created on March 19th, 2021, the same day the Alan Becker Clips channel was created.

## Videos

The Story of Animator vs. Animation - 10 Year Anniversary
## Gallery

Alan Becker Logo.jpgAlan Becker logoAlan Becker logo from store.webplogoAlan Becker atom.com profile.jpgatom.com profileAlan Becker and Charles Yeh atom.com profile.jpgAlan Becker and Charles Yeh atom.com profileAlan Becker Twitter banner.jpgTwitter bannerAlanbeckersupport eBay profile.webpalanbeckersupport eBay profile

## Trivia

* On September 29th 2020, Alan posted a gif on his twitter showing Green as a stick bug, in reference to a meme. (The gif was animated by @ellis02magson)

> is this meme dead yet?
>
> Tweet description, Twitter

* On May 18th 2022, Alan posted an animation on his Twitter made by Able Rai, one of his animators, for his birthday.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 *The Story of Animator vs. Animation - 10 Year Anniversary* by **Alan Becker** (June 3, 2016)
2. ↑ *Lumin (2013)* by **Columbia College of Art and Design**
3. ↑ *Behind the Scenes - Animation vs. Minecraft* by **Alan Becker** (December 14, 2015)
4. ↑ *I have an announcement!* by **Alan Becker** (July 26, 2017)
5. ↑ *Villagers - Animation vs. Minecraft Shorts Ep. 9* by **Alan Becker** (July 18, 2018)
6. ↑ *I made a Stick Figure Animation Course!* by **Alan Becker** (November 29, 2019)
7. ↑ *Stick Figure Animation* by **Alan Becker** on **Bloop Animation**