For 2 stars in the Design Assignment category, I did the Favorite Movie Quote Assignment from the Digital Storytelling Assignment Bank. The image is from the movie Gone with the Wind, which has been on my mind recently, probably in part due to my response to the “Name that Movie” Daily Create. In this image, Scarlett O’Hara dances with Rhett Butler, but not in the romantic circumstances you might imagine. Rather, Scarlett is supposed to be in mourning for her first husband, a man she married at age 16 to spite the man who rejected her while remaining close to him and his family. While her dark clothing and black veil fool the rest of the world, Rhett Butler sees right through the guise of guilt to the bored, childish Scarlett, who would rather look pretty to dance and flirt with the men at the ball. So he prompts her to do something scandalous (if you want to know the full backstory, read the book! I can’t explain how cleverly he did it without giving away a ridiculous amount of plot.) That is, he takes her out to dance, IN PUBLIC. And he doesn’t give a damn (bad pun intended).
The quote does not actually come from the movie, but rather from the novel on which the movie is based. As much as I love the movie, its hard to find any movie quotes that narrate exactly what Scarlett is thinking. Its no fault of the movie; if you have read the book (which most people in 1939 had), its exceedingly obvious what Scarlett is thinking at any given moment. And the rubric technically does say that “opposite interpretation” should earn a 30% of 30%…so yeah, it just made more sense to do it this way.
What I love about this quote is how easily it applies to both Scarlett and Rhett. The basis of their relationship is that they are fundamentally very similar people in that both of them tend to be very down-to-earth and selfish, unlike many of the honorable people around them, and thus they both do very well as the genteel civilization of the Old South crumbles around them.
Once I had my quote and image, I followed a simple process to make the image for the assignment. I opened a drawing in a Google document (this process has been discussed in numerous other blog posts and is quite simple/intuitive, so I decided to omit it from this post), and inserted an image via URL into the drawing as follows:
N.B. The image was licensed for reuse with modification, another reason why I chose it over others.
Once the image had been inserted, it looked as follows:
I moused over “Text box” as I took a screenshot in order to show where the option is. I clicked on that and drew a text box in the same manner that one would do on Microsoft software such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, etc. Just about anyone with basic computer experience can probably follow everything after this point. But if you want to see how I drew the text box before typing in the words, here you go:
And finally, once I typed in the quote, I centered it on the page horizontally, as can be seen below:
And that’s all I had to do. Actually, doing the screenshots took longer than the assignment itself. But hopefully it will help someone else do the same assignment with the incredibly easy-to-use tools on Google Documents. (Also, hopefully it will get someone to read Gone with the Wind, the novel by Margaret Mitchell, or at least watch the movie. Both are underrated classics.)
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