This is a new series that I am going to start doing about people that inspire me. For the first blog post in this new series, I want to talk about why Alana King inspires me. Alana King is a youtuber who has been posting videos since 2013. She started to do filmmaking in 2011. At the time of posing this Alana has 39,212 subscribers. To me, not just by the amount of subscribers she has, but by the content she produces and the things that she has done; I see Alana as a very popular YouTube influencer. Alana is very inspiring, nice, strong, supportive, honest, friendly, and Wayward AF person. She is in school for filmmaking and still maintains both her school life and YouTube life, and that is one of the many, many, reasons why Alana King inspires me.
She is very knowledgeable with camera equipment, filming videos, and editing videos. I feel as though she has great skills and potential to one day become a great filmmaker, and that day could very well be soon. Another reason why Alana inspires me is because of what she has accomplished. Alana has accomplished many things in her life, like getting to moderate a panel at a Wizard World Comic-Con convention and also getting to do her own panel all by herself. As well as, working with Creation Entertainment to produce content and some of the actors from the show “Supernatural”. She also is running a Book Club with Lynn Zubernis who is the author of the book Family Don’t End With Blood and Shelley Harper who is the owner of Con*Quest Journals.
There is a Facebook group for the Fandom that you can join and see what book were reading each month, they do a livestream for each book we read so that we can all discuss it and you can find out when the date is for that, and you can chat with everyone else in the group about your thoughts and opinions.
Alana, Lynn, and Shelley also post about the information on there twitter accounts so you can go follow them on there as well. Even though Alana is only 20 years old, she has done many great things and I can see that she has a bold, bright future ahead of her.
Alana inspires me because she is very strong and resilient, when a problem comes up, she handles it and figures out a way to solve it. She has helped many, many, people and I am one of those people who she has helped. Before I started to watch her videos, I was new to the Supernatural fandom, at the time I was really interested in BookTube, and her video happened to be one of the videos that I stumbled upon. Then I started to scroll through her YouTube channel and look at the other kind of videos that she posts. I probably binged watch a little more of her videos then a normal person would have, kind of like how you watch marathons of shows or movies or binge watch Netflix. Anyway, there were a lot of great things that I saw on her YouTube channel and I think I’ve been watching Alana’s videos for close to two years now. Because of that I’ve seen some growth over the time of how long she’s been posting for since I started to watch her videos. She is very compassionate and friendly to her subscribers. I have seen this in her vlogs and in the mail time videos that she does where you can send something to her P.O. box, and I have also sent her a letter.
Alana inspires me because seeing her strength and what she has accomplished and done throughout her life so far inspires me to do the things that I want to do in life. Because of her, I was able to go to my first Supernatural convention, which was one of the best experiences of my life. I wouldn’t have even known about them or what to do or bring to the conventions without her or her videos about how to survive a convention and her convention vlogs.
Alana inspires me because of the things she has done and what she believes in and when she believes in something, she makes it happen. In March this year, Alana organized a campaign to help the non-profit organization To Write Love On Her Arms, which helps people with addiction, depression, self-injury, and thoughts of suicide. Alana was running the campaign in the name of Jared Padalecki’s Always Keep Fighting campaign to raise money to help TWLOHA and she made a notebook full of all of the names of people who donated to the campaign and letters to Jared.
At first, the goal was only $1,000, by the time it ended the campaign raised $13,100. The response to the campaign was amazing, and Alana did a great job organizing and promoting it, and the money went to a great cause.
Alana inspires me because of the things she does for her subscribers. She stays up late to edit videos and upload them to YouTube, so that the videos will be uploaded in the morning so we can watch them. She goes out of her way to plan things and record them and organize videos with guests to have on them and plan livestreams and carries around heavy camera equipment to give the best quality that she can and when she travels to cons has to take all of it out for going through security checks. She comes up with new ideas for videos to give us new content to watch. She does so much for her subscribers and gives them so much and I am both thankful and inspired by it. Lots of people don't think that being a Youtuber is an actual career to have. But Alana proves that wrong so often and does so much to prove that wrong. On August 18, this year Alana posted a picture on Instagram and in the caption talked about her life being a YouTuber.
Alana inspires me because of what she creates and what she makes, like all of the film projects she has done on her YouTube channel. The Wayward Documentary she did in January this year, about why the wayward movement, created from “Supernatural”, is so important for equal and accurate representation of women in the media.
Alana talked with some of the actors on the show like Kim Rhodes, and some fans of the show to get both perspectives on it.
Another film project of Alana’s is her Supernatural Convention vlogs that she has been doing since 2017, for the past year she has been partnered with Creation Entertainment to cover the conventions that they run. Alana mostly does “Supernatural” conventions, but has done “Once Upon A Time” and “Riverdale” cons. In her vlogs, she shows what it’s like to go to a Creation Entertainment convention, the events they have, the vendors area, photo ops, autographs, things like that. This is her most recent vlog that is up on her channel at the time of posting this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Md7KM95_z4I
Recently, Alana posted another film project in June this year, to promote Creation Entertainments new cons called “The Giving Back Tour” headlined by Misha Collins where the money earned from the convention ticket sales goes to a local charity in the city that the con is being held in. She worked with some of the Supernatural actors that are attending the convention as guests including Misha Collins, Alexander Calvert, Kim Rhodes, Briana Buckmaster, Ruth Conell, Richard Speight Jr., Rob Benedict, Rachel Miner, and Mark Pellegrino. They all talk about the events and games that they are going to be doing at the conventions and how much fun it will be to come and check them out.
There was another film project that I want to talk about that Alana posted in October 2017 for a client. It was an informational video for a new virtual reality game called Legacies. The people making the game was launching an IndieGoGo campaign to fund it. The people who were making the game also filmed all the footage for the video and sent it to Alana to edit all together, and they sent the rough draft back and forth until they came up with a final product.
In August 2017, Alana posted another documentary this one being about a replica impala from “Supernatural: called Thor, that was made by Experience Entertainment. In the documentary, she interviews the owner of the car, Kim LeMay, and filmed a lot of B-roll footage of the car. Because of Alana’s video the replica impala gained a lot of attention and the documentary was able to be used for promotion for Thor: the impala.
The last film project that I want to talk about is one that Alana did about her life called My Chicago Story posted in December 2016. It was an assignment for one of her college courses and she decided to create a video showing what it was like to move to a big city like Chicago from a small town in Ohio. She filmed the same kind of things in the different places of both Chicago and Ohio and was showing the difference between the two places. The filming and editing process for this video took quite some time to do and in the end it was very rewarding for Alana and created a very cinematic and amazing video. It is one of my favourite videos that she has made on her YouTube channel. In the caption of Alana's Instagram post of the picture below, she quoted something from Doctor Who that I really liked, "We all change, when you think about it. We're all different people all through our lives. And that's ok, that's good, you've gotta keep moving so as long as you remember all the people that you used to be".
There’s another video that I want to talk about, Alana didn’t categorize it as one of her projects on her website, which is where I got all of the descriptions from; however, I still count it as one. In November 2017, she posted a video called Where I Feel At Home, which is a video compiled of clips from Alana’s convention vlogs about her supernatural family, the people she has met through the supernatural fandom, things she has gotten to do, and people she has gotten to meet from “Supernatural”. It’s about her family and what they mean to her. One of my favourite moments from the video is a clip in the end of the video, there is a montage of all of the photo ops Alana has been in and seeing all of the happiness in them puts a smile on me.
Now all of these videos aren’t just film projects that Alana has done. There things that she has made, that she has created, she took the time and effort to think of the ideas for them, organize everything to make it happen, film everything, then edit, then post and promote it. She did all this and possibly more with also having to handle anything else going on in her life. She found the time to make it happen.
All of these things inspire me, they inspire me constantly. How strong, kind, smart, determined, motivational, hardworking, creative, skilled, persistent, heart-warming, smiley, friendly, sweet, extraordinary, and Wayward AF she is, inspires me every day of my life and will continue to inspire me throughout the rest of my life.
If you’re interested in “Supernatural”, “Harry Potter”, or anything fandom related I would highly, highly recommend checking out Alana’s YouTube channel and her other social accounts.
Alana's Social Links:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/kingbooks
Website: www.alanakingbooks.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/_KingBooks_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alanak145/