OVERVIEW

'til Morning is a short full-motion video game developed over the course of 4 days in March of 2023 at the University of Chicago. A handful of students at the College were inspired by the strange form factor of the FMV genre and historical games in the genre such as Night Trap, so we decided to challenge ourselves to make a short FMV over the course of one long weekend.

Prior to the production period, I spent time with my fellow producers planning out how we would spend our time, recruiting the necessary collaborators, procuring the necessary equipment, brainstorming a story concept, and casting our game. Then, during the weekend of production, I filled many rolls, including coordinating the scriptwriting, directing and filming the game, editing footage and organizing assets, and creating all graphical assets for the project.

This project challenged me to work quickly and efficiently and eschew my perfectionist tendencies in favor of "good enough." With such a tight timeline, we were often glad to have anything at all, much less a good version of everything, which allowed us to streamline our process and really focus on what was absolutely necessary for the project. 'til Morning also taught me a lot about rapid pipeline development -- over the course of the 4 days of production, we had to have as many different steps of the process going at once, and as one of the producers (and the producer most involved with the filming pipeline), I ended up needing to establish a number of asset and workflow pipelines on the fly. These included: a filming/script checklist system to ensure we got all the audio and visuals we needed, mid-shoot day footage ingest and organization protocols so we were backing up all of our data and prepping it for editing while still filming, and a collaborative editing pipeline that allowed for certain steps in the edit to be delegated to multiple editors to maximize efficiency and quality.

My Contributions:

• Managing pre-production, including space reservations, equipment procurement, scheduling, casting, and running pre-production meetings

• Story coordination, including pre-production brainstorming, outlining and flowcharting, and rounds of proofreading and copy editing

• Directing and filming all footage for the game

• Script supervising

• Setting up, running, and managing filming and sound equipment

• Coordinating filming schedules and managing actor energy levels and needs

• Set design, decoration, and prop procurement

• Developing asset pipelines for efficient editing workflow

• Rough editing footage for takes and script consistency

• Fine editing footage for clarity and game-engine-readiness

• Audio editing and sanitizing

• Designing menu UI, transition graphics, and trailer

• Designing promotional material and itch.io presence

• QA testing and re-edits