'til Morning
Full-Motion Video Game
Video Editor
Mar 2023
Tools Used:
Final Cut Pro, Google Sheets
Background: This is a small-team project made in a self-imposed game jam timeline.
THE PROJECT
The idea of 'til Morning arose from a discussion with some friends about full-motion video (FMV) games and the desire to try our hand at making one ourselves. We opted to all block off one weekend at the beginning of spring and turn the project into a self-imposed game jam, mainly to help keep the scope small and also to consolidate the amount of time we would need equipment and access to filming locations for. Beforehand, we met once to play through a couple FMV games for inspiration (Not For Broadcast and Telling Lies), briefly discussing what mechanics, characters, and filming locations we planned to incorporate, but all of the writing, filming, editing, and programming of 'til Morning took place over the course of an extended weekend—four days in total. When discussing themes for the game, we were interested in exploring the idea of a metaphorical time loop; not necessarily a proper sci-fi time loop (a la Outer Wilds), but rather a story in which time feels like it’s going in circles. 'til Morning tells the story of Ivy and Nadia, two graduate students whose relationship is growing stagnant as they head towards an uncertain future, and the player must navigate choices in their lives to help them find the healthiest, most sustainable outcome for both of them.
'til Morning presents the player with a number of dialogue choices that impact the story.
THE PROCESS
My role in 'til Morning was as the primary video editor for the project. I was on-site for nearly all of the filming and was often handed a flash drive containing hours’ worth of raw footage immediately after wrapping the shoot for each scene. Because we had two cameras rolling at all times plus a separate audio track, the first step in my workflow was to sync up these three tracks. Then, I had to sift through many different takes to find the best ones, making decisions about when to cut camera angles. I also frequently cut together shots from multiple different takes to put emphasis on specific lines, while masking continuity errors that had been overlooked in filming, such as inconsistent hand placement of the actors between takes.
In addition to splicing together scenes based on multiple takes, the fact that ‘til Morning is a game and not a movie meant that there were frequently branching dialogue options that could come after a particular line. This made it incredibly important to keep track of where one “sequence” ended and the next began, especially because some scenes diverge before converging again later. Another important step required several times in each scene was separating out a 5- to 10-second still shot before each decision, in order to give the player time to make a choice while continuing to keep footage rolling.
Since I was the team member exporting the final version of each clip, I was also responsible for establishing a clip naming convention and tracking possible sequences of clips in a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet aided our team’s programmer in correctly implementing these sequences to match the complex flowchart of story paths.
'til Morning’s complex branching narrative was drawn out during the writing process (top), which I later organized in a spreadsheet for our team’s programmer to implement (bottom).
THE RESULT
Perhaps the most relieving moment during the process of developing 'til Morning was the moment we knew that we had enough “good” takes of each scene in order to officially wrap filming. From this point on, we were fairly confident that the editing and programming, while extremely time-consuming (I logged 15 hours in Final Cut Pro during one of the days), would get done, but it was still very exciting when we realized we had fully completed this game in a mere four days. While we would have loved to add more features and polish (such as subtitles), this was simply not feasible within our timeline, but I am still quite pleased with the result we produced in such a short time. You can download 'til Morning from itch.io below.
With a single playthrough lasting about 30 minutes, 'til Morning offers 2-3 hours of gameplay with branching narratives that lead to six different endings.