By Kylee Johnson
“It was crazy. It was the first time I ever blew up and it was awesome.” If you haven’t heard of senior Charlie Curtis-Beard, you’ve probably been living under a rock for the past few months. At the end of May, right around the time of school getting out, Curtis-Beard began to make “vines.” A vine is an app that kind of mimics Instagram, but instead of posting pictures, an individual posts a six second video. Pretty crazy right?
Curtis-Beard says, “Vine is an app where you can post your ideas… It’s pretty much you showing your creativity in 6 seconds. So how creative can you be in six seconds?”
Curtis-Beard got the idea to start vining because while he was on Twitter, he started to watch vines and thought to himself, “Oh I could easily make these.” And so it began.
He started off posting what he calls “stupid stuff” but he kept posting and posting. Then he posted a vine called “Fail Freestyle.” This vine ended up getting 15,000 likes, and then it was popping up on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Since then, Curtis-Beard has had about 7 vines that have gone viral. “It feels actually pretty cool.” Curtis-Beard says, “It’s cool because it’s blowing up and it’s all this attention, and you’re like, ‘Oh cool! A video I made that’s just this little thing that I didn’t even intend to blow is going big’ and it’s awesome.”
Although Curtis-Beard does Vine by himself, he also Vines with some of his friends. Junior Jerrin Ewings says, “He [Charlie] makes them, but then we just make them better.” Although Vines are only six seconds long, they can sometimes take forever to make. Charlie said, “We [he and his friends] had to keep doing it [“Things that Guys Run Away From”] over and over because we couldn’t get it right. It was here [Lincoln High] and it was so bad. It took so long to do and I was actually about to quit but they were like no, we’ve got to keep going.”
So where do all of Charlie’s ideas come from? He says that he gets ideas from just living life. It could be something funny that someone says or that happens and it just makes a light bulb go off in his head.
There are different kinds of Vines. There are Vines that one can do by “tweaking” which is basically just talking to the camera about something such as “I hate when this happens!” Charlie’s favorite type of Vine to make are the skits. “My favorite is when I have a lot of people and we put together a skit. That’s really fun to do.”
With 35,000 followers, Charlie Curtis-Beard says, “I’m not vine famous. Secondly, just because I vine a lot, doesn’t make it a big-headed thing, ya know? It’s so little, it’s like an app that I somehow got a bunch of followers from vining a lot.” Charlie is continuing to Vine whenever he has time, and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
“Vine keeps growing every single day. Ideas keep coming the more you do it, so the more I keep going with it, the more inspired I get to do more. And just growing as a viner in general inspires me to work for something and do other stuff. I don’t think I’ll be stopping anytime soon.”
