When a woman meets her fiancé’s family, she plays a board game to get acquainted, but things get serious when the family’s lawyer drops dead.
Music: “13 Sins” by Nicholas Jeudy
Video description
Video Description: “Mystery of the Murderous Mug” Trailer. Duration, 39 seconds. “13 sins” by Nicholas Jeudy. Digital drawing. A woman looking down at three mugs in foreground sitting on a surface. From left to right, a cup-shaped mug with the image of a winged teddy bear waving an arm, a skull-and-crossbones on a tall mug with a handle made of bones, and a typical mug with cartoon question marks all over. The woman is see from chest up, face in three-quarters view with left brow drawn in, right brow arched up, and right hand perched up above the mugs. Watermark of the word “Storyfeather” along upper left sleeve. Title card with the words “Short Story” and “Genre: Mystery,” is displayed at top. Tagline is displayed at bottom. It reads: “When a woman meets her fiancé’s family, she plays a board game to get acquainted, but things get serious when the family’s lawyer drops dead.” Lines from the story appear in sequence at center and bottom: “It’s a game within a game, Solve his murder, and you’ll solve your own. You’ll find the antidote in the treasure chest, and your sleeping beauty will wake, and you’ll live happily thereafter. There’s nothing to solve…You’re the murderer.” Site URL appears at bottom center throughout and fades at end. As the last line disappears, the story title appears at center, and a text card appears at top that reads “Available to Read Now.”
Welcome to Year 10 of Storyfeather
Every year’s short stories (mostly) follow a theme. For the tenth year, every month’s stories share a genre or theme, some anchor point that the reader can rely on. But within that, there are strange concoctions brewing. The genre’s merge, archetypes collide, mythologies mash…welcome to the Year of Fusion.
February Base Element:
🍕🍓 FOOD-UARY! 🍰🍫
FUSION RECIPE
Base element for February: Food!
Fusion Element: Collection of Mugs
The placeholder title for this story was “Dinner With a Side of Murder,” which basically just sets out the initial premise, a combination of someone coming to meet their fiancé’s family for the first time and also getting caught up in a murder mystery game with said family. To this we introduce the fusion element, a collection of mugs (because I was grasping for something and I probably had one of my mugs nearby). So the dad has a mug collection, and I wanted it to be involved in the mystery somehow—maybe the mugs hold clues, or maybe they hold…poison? But is there even a murder? Why is the family lawyer at the dinner? What’s with the fainting fiancé? What exactly is going on here?
How I did the digital drawing for my story, “Mystery of the Murderous Mug,” from a sketch to the final image.
Video Description
Video description: Drafting of story image from Sketch to Final. Duration, 27 seconds. Digital drawing, square. A woman looking down at three mugs in foreground sitting on a surface. From left to right, a cup-shaped mug with the image of a winged teddy bear waving an arm, a skull-and-crossbones on a tall mug with a handle made of bones, and a typical mug with cartoon question marks all over. The woman is see from chest up, face in three-quarters view with left brow drawn in, right brow arched up, and right hand perched up above the mugs. Text at top reads “Digital Drawing for Short Story.” A fade animation displays an airbrush sketch of a human face near center. The words “Sketch to Final Drawing” appears at top right. All the text and the final image fade to show the full starting sketch. The video then transitions through several images showing the sketching of the main figure and the three mugs; then the inking, the laying down of base colors, the addition of a color gradient as a background, and finally, the addition of shadows, highlights, and textures to arrive at the final image. The story title, “Mystery of the Murderous Mug” appears at top. A watermark of “Storyfeather.com” appears at bottom center throughout.
Genre: Mystery, Fantasy
Tags: Board Game, Dinner, Elaine, Family, Fiance, Game, Grandmother, Mug, Stella
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