Books Aren't Boring

Hello everyone! I'm Perri, also "known" as Books Aren't Boring, and if you want to know a little bit more about me, I'll take an excerpt from my "about page" of my website:

"Have you ever been, I don’t know, writing an incredibly important final essay as the last assignment about the book you’ve been reading for the entire summer? And then you realize you don’t understand anything about what you’re trying to do because you accidentally fell asleep halfway through? Then, you text all of your friends saying “I really don’t understand this, anyone else?” and you all exclaim in unison how boring the book was and how you’re just going to Sparknote the entire story. It’s honestly surprising how much of high school is just — that."

(check out booksarentboring.com for more content!)

The Beginning...

For those who like reading more than writing, here's a brief backstory of my project:

What can I do to make good content for my college essays?
Whoops, Youtube channel created!
I need more content for this project.
Surveys and interviews created!
The grand video, hastily scrounged together in two weeks.

My First Video Thumbnail: East of Eden!

1984 Video Thumbnail

Pride and Prejudice Thumbnail (my most popular video)

Lord of the Flies Thumbnail

Why Did I Start This Project?

When I began to create the idea of Books Aren't Boring, the main goal was to create a project that would encompass my interests in a way that would let people know what I really wanted to pursue in life. Even if my direction shifted in regards to the channel/project, I would always have something to fall back on that would give me something interesting to talk about and let people know that my main focus is on literature and reading. Of course, as the project went on, perhaps people may have gotten the impression that I was interested in media as well, which is something that I've grown to appreciate throughout this past year.

A lot of kids hate required reading, and you, reader, have probably heard at least one complaint about somebody needing to read a group of chapters for English or having a large journal assignment they need to turn in that involves loads of work that often feels unnecessary. Generally, we can all figure out how this happens, but I wanted to get to the root of this problem that is so often seen in classrooms across (at least) the United States.

Schedule and Learning Process

To the left is the original schedule that I created for this project. While I ended up getting a bit behind, as I found that the "5 more videos" milestones were much more difficult than I anticipated, I ended up making the deadline.

Interviews and surveys were sent out later than I had planned as well, due to a general abundance of work and the difficulties of getting responses on emails because of people's work schedules. It was not too late though, and I was able to get everything sent out and completed, with enough time to spare! Thanks to the cooperation of not only the interviewees but also the students of Shadow Mountain High School, I had plenty to discuss in my final video.

Learning the language of iMovie helped me in creating my final project on time.

Throughout the past year and a half, I had to figure out how to add effects into videos without overly complicating the process and how not to export videos that were 5 gigabytes large (the largest they should ever be is around 1.5g, I've discovered).

I also learned planning and how to ramble in front of a camera long enough to edit it down into a comprehensive video. Finally, I understand why regular Youtubers have to spend days filming and editing, because at the end of the day there are way fewer useable parts of a video than you can imagine.

Often, you spend large chunks looking into space for the next thing you want to say. Who wants to watch that? But at the end of the day, the videos ended up looking pretty good.