ROLE

Producer, Director, Video Editor

DESCRIPTION

Ivy and Nadia have been dating nearly since the day they met. But as the years have passed, their relationship has begun to deteriorate. Now, with Nadia graduating soon and Ivy still with one year left in grad school, they find themselves at a crossroads.

'til Morning is a short full-motion video game about a complex and stagnating relationship. Follow Ivy and Nadia through a day in their lives as they grapple with their future, their past, and how to deal with the present. Make decisions that will shape their story, as well as the rest of their lives. Can they rekindle their love and find happiness together? Or is their relationship already doomed to fail?

DEVELOPMENT PERIOD

March 2023 // 4 day production period

TOOLS USED

Davinci Resolve, Google Drive, Illustrator, Logic Pro X

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: