When I read over the description for “If Movie Posters Told the Truth,” I knew I wanted to do a scary movie because they are all so predictable. One of my favorite suspenseful movies is Final Destination 2. This may be due to the fact that a friend of mine took me to see this movie with her without having seen the first one. I thought it was amazing because I was enwrapped in the guessing of who was going to get away from death, because someone had to escape. Afterwards, I went back and viewed the first film and then watched the additional sequels that came out, and regardless of their repetitiveness, I still like these movies. However, I did tire of the third film and any that came out after that. I wanted to let the viewers know that this movie is exactly like the first.

First, I had to find an image of the movie poster that would show up large enough without being pixelated. Next, I pasted it into a PowerPoint slide. Since the background was already black, it made the next few steps much easier. I also set the background of the slide to solid black fill so that the original image would blend in with the rest of the slide. Next, I had to insert a text box and write my new title and caption, both of which were separate text boxes. After I had my text inserted, I had to make the text box show up over the top of the image. To do that, I had to right click within the text box and choose, “Bring to Front.” I played around with the fonts in PowerPoint in order to try to match the fonts on the original movie poster. I found the title to be most similar to the font DFKai-SB. I wanted the “Again” portion of my title to mirror the “2” in the original title by making it larger than the rest of it. I also capitalized the entire title to match the original. Next, I noticed that the original title had a blue glow behind it. I highlighted the text, right clicked, and clicked on “Format Text Effects.” The “Glow and Soft Edges” tab allowed me to pick a thickness and color to glow behind the text. I intentionally left the original text and my inserted text both visible up until this point so that I could use the original as a guide. After my text was how I wanted it to look, I right clicked inside the text box and chose to fill the box with solid black. This was much easier than it could have been because the background was already black. I repeated these steps for the caption at the top as well, except I made the thickness of the glow thinner and chose “Chiller” as the most appropriate font. I then saved the PowerPoint slide as a .jpeg file.
Overall, I was pretty pleased with the turnout of the image. It ended up being easier than I thought. It just took some time playing around in PowerPoint. I originally played around with the image in Paint. I even painted over the original text with black but then decided that it would be easier to match the text if it was still there. I also decided it would be better to have access to more fonts in PowerPoint, so I got rid of the Paint version of the poster and started over. My original intentions were to try to match my remix poster with the original poster as much as possible. I struggled when it came to getting the font to match the original poster. I wanted to have the glow behind it and had a hard time figuring out how to do that. I played around with the text a good bit. I even tried looking up glow letters on Google to insert over the image, but I knew there was an easier way to do it than that. I finally saw the “Format Text Effects” option when I right clicked and found the glow option. After that, I just played around with the glow color and thickness until it looked close to the same as the original.
I think an assignment like this would work great with any novel or play that was being read in the classroom. It could be used as a summarization activity at the end of the unit or lesson. It is first acting as a short, but sweet summary. Then they could go deeper into the text, providing textual evidence even, to support the reasons for the new truthful poster. They could demonstrate their learning by reflecting on the choices they made with the poster and for what reason. What were they trying to show about the novel or play through this poster image? It also lets the teacher know whether or not they enjoyed the reading/acting.
Another assignment that could incorporate this idea is a unit on persuasion. They could take a normal persuasive advertisement and write the truth over the persuasive verbiage. This would require the student to analyze the persuasive digital text and then alter it by writing their truth about the topic, which could incorporate research before they complete the image remix.