Fund This: ‘Murder Mystery Dinner Party’ Brings Gothic Lit To Life

Welcome to the Fund This column! Each week, we’ll look at a planned web series or other online video project currently in search of funding on crowdfunding sites. We’ll tell you what the series is all about and explain why it is worth your money. Do you have a project that’s currently being crowdfunded? Contact us to let us know and we may feature it in upcoming installments and check out previous installments right here.

Project Name: Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party

Asking For: $55,000 on Kickstarter

Amount Raised Thus Far (At Time Of Post): $11,956

Days Remaining In Campaign (At Time Of Post): 33

Description: Guess who’s coming to dinner? Here’s a hint: If you’ve read a lot of classic lit, you’re going to recognize a lot of the guests. Shipwrecked Comedy is behind Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, a series that will translate its titular scribe’s penchant for Gothic settings to a web series format.

As its title suggests, Murder Mystery Dinner Party will take place at a supper gathering that turns deadly, and Poe’s guests will be a combination of literary characters and real-life authors. Shipwrecked co-founder Sinead Persaud, for example, will play Poe’s muse Lenore, while Lizzie Bennet Diaries star Ashley Clements will join the fun as Charlotte Brontë. Additional characters will be revealed as the project’s Kickstarter campaign inches toward its ultimate goal.

The interactions these characters will generate are on full display in the project’s introductory video, in which Poe (played by the other Shipwrecked co-founder, Sean Persaud) and Lenore set the table for their dinner party with a cinematic flair not commonly seen in Kickstarter pitches.

Creator Bio: Shipwrecked, which describes its niche as “historical literary comedy,” has been around since 2013 and has produced web series like Kissing in the Rain and A Tell Tale Vlog. Its website describes Murder Mystery Dinner Party as its “largest project to date.”

Best Perk: The $50 dollar perk, which the Shipwrecked team calls its “amuse bouche,” includes a notecard that reveals the murder mystery’s planning stage. The biggest upside to this perk, as Shipwrecked puts it, is that “‘Amouse Bouche’ is pretty fun to say.”

Why You Should Fund It: $55,000 is no small sum, but potential Murder Mystery Dinner Party backers can feel assured that their money will go to good use. On its YouTube channel, Shipwrecked has released dozens of videos, and they’re all of impeccable quality. The actors who will grace the screen in Murder Mystery are fine performers, and the show’s production is a good bet to blend its historical influences with modern techniques.

You don’t need to go combing through Shipwrecked’s back catalog, however, to understand how much the studio cares about it’s work. Murder Mystery‘s cinematic pitch video goes above and beyond the typical Kickstarter offering, and it stands as proof that Shipwrecked is only willing to release content that meets its incredibly high standards. There’s no reason to think Murder Mystery Dinner Party will be any less exquisite.

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