Hamza Sajid — filmmaker, director of photography and editor. IL FAVORE, a neo-noir film opening by Il Matto Films, and the full Cambridge AS Level Media Studies (9607) foundation portfolio.

IL FAVORE uses the visual codes of neo-noir and the mafia film accurately enough that an audience places it inside ten seconds, then breaks one convention on purpose.

The codes we kept are all in the first half minute. Low-key chiaroscuro on the card table at 0:06, lit by a single spotlight.

Dark suits, sunglasses indoors, a boss holding cards while two bodyguards stand behind him. A convoy of SUVs coming down the ramp at 1:02. The opening tracking shot at 0:00 stays on shoes climbing marble stairs, so the audience reads money and status before it sees a face. None of that needs explaining because the genre has trained people to read it.

What we changed is where the danger sits. Crime openings almost always put the threat in an alley, a lock-up or a back room. Ours puts it in a bright, expensive barber shop under warm high-key lighting — the safest-looking room in the film. That removes the visual warning an audience relies on.

When the capos walk in at 1:29 the lighting scheme itself is what gets invaded, and the contrast between the two schemes does the work that a line of threatening dialogue normally does.

The second departure is that there is no violence. The tensest shots in the film are the two macro extreme close-ups of the razor at 0:53 and 1:24, and in both of them nothing happens. The blade is only shaving. The threat is entirely in what the tool could do, which is a shift from showing violence to implying leverage.

On representation, the film deals with organised power and wealth rather than with ethnicity, and it deliberately avoids the scruffy-criminal stereotype. Everyone in the mafia group is groomed, still and expensively dressed; the boss's authority in the close-up at 0:40 comes entirely from the fact that he does not move and looks straight down the lens. Costume carries the power relationship: the customer is in white, which reads as exposed and easily marked, while the boss arrives at 1:10 in cream — the same palette, but settled and untouchable. One is being looked at. The other is doing the looking, and the mirror shots at 0:36 and 0:59 make that literal by showing the customer watched from angles he cannot see.

The reading we left open is that the film also works as pure style. That is the compromise of working inside a genre this coded: you cannot rely on the iconography to be understood in 110 seconds and dismantle it at the same time.

Our target audience is 16 to 35, C1/B, split between mainstream filmgoers and cinephiles who follow directors rather than franchises. They choose atmospheric psychological thrillers, which means they will sit through a slow opening as long as it is building something.

We engaged them through sound before image. The razor scrape at 0:53 is amplified well past its natural level, and it works on people physically before they have worked out the plot. Nobody is cut and there is no blood anywhere in the film, but the sound makes an audience flinch, which is a stronger reaction than an injury would have produced. Running a smooth retro acoustic vocal track underneath the mob preparation pulls in the opposite direction on purpose — the calm music against the cold garage is acoustic subversion, and the gap between what you hear and what you see is where the unease comes from.

Our own audience testing shaped two decisions. The first cut held the opening shot too long and people disengaged; we shortened it and the sequence tested tenser rather than slower. We also found that the combination of low-key lighting, suit costuming and cool tungsten contrast communicated the genre on its own, which is why the film carries no dialogue or voiceover exposition at all.

The structure withholds its answer. The film ends at 1:40 on a gunshot over black with the favour never named, so the audience leaves speculating rather than satisfied. That is also what makes it shareable — an unresolved 110 seconds generates conversation in a way a resolved one does not.

As a real media text, IL FAVORE is an independent high-concept short with no stars, so a major studio is not a realistic route. A boutique distributor like A24 or Neon is, because their model is built on directorial voice rather than on marketing spend. The route would start on the festival circuit — the short film sections at Venice, SXSW and Tribeca — since selection is the only credible substitute for a marketing budget. Critical attention there is what makes the next step possible. From there an exclusive SVOD release on MUBI or Apple TV+, both of which programme for this exact audience and do not bury short work.

Marketing would be organic rather than paid. Vertical cut-downs of the elevator reveal for TikTok and Reels, since the genre reads instantly even in a still. Character stills released as a suit of playing cards, tied to the II Matto name and the tarot motif, so the campaign gives people something to collect and speculate about. It costs nothing but design time, which is the point when there is no budget.

My work moved from operating a camera to controlling an image, and the clearest evidence is that the problems from the preliminary exercises stopped appearing.

In the preliminary work I could not hold focus on a moving subject, and my handheld shots carried a jitter that no amount of stabilisation in the edit could rescue, because the shake was in the frame rather than the framing. On IL FAVORE I was cinematographer, editor and sound designer, so both problems were mine to fix. Focus became a marked and rehearsed process instead of something judged by eye — that is the only reason the macro close-ups at 0:53 and 1:24 hold sharp on a blade moving against skin, which is about the least forgiving shot in the film. Stability became a question of picking the right tool: gimbal for the tracking shot down the garage ramp at 1:02, locked-off tripod for the card table at 0:06 where any movement would have softened the stillness the shot depends on.

Lighting moved from a formula to an intention. In the exercises I lit by three-point recipe and got footage that was correctly exposed and completely characterless. On this film I designed two schemes that had to disagree — warm high-key in the shop, cold low-key off headlights in the garage — and committed to underexposing the garage far further than I would previously have risked. Practical problem solving came with it: for one insert a single white LED placed inside a bag had to read as a real source on camera, and it took five positions before I found the one that lit the contents without blowing out the frame.

Editing is where the biggest change happened, and it was conceptual rather than technical. Cutting three locations against each other taught me that shot length is itself an argument. Hold the barber shop too long and the convoy stops feeling like it is arriving; cut to the garage too often and the shave stops being calm enough to be unnerving. The thirteen-second slow-motion elevator reveal at 1:10 works only because everything before it is short — it is long by contrast, not by duration.

Sound developed last. I learned to balance amplified Foley against a stylised acoustic track and to place the gunshot at 1:40 so it lands on the cut rather than after it. My weakest area is still dialogue capture: the mic gets positioned by eye rather than monitored properly through headphones during the take. That is the first thing I would change on the next production.

The technology mattered as a chain rather than as a list of kit, and what I actually learned was how each stage limits the next.

On hardware we shot with a high-dynamic-range body and fast prime lenses. The wide aperture is what makes the macro close-ups work — at 0:53 the blade is sharp and the room behind it is not, so there is nowhere else for the audience to look. Movement was split between a gimbal for the tracking shots and a heavy tripod for anything that needed to be completely still, like the card table at 0:06. Lighting was practical LED panels, warm and high-key in the shop, with the garage lit off vehicle headlights and a hard top light for the bound figure at 0:55.

In post, the edit was assembled in Adobe Premiere Pro. The genuinely useful skill was multi-track audio layering: keeping Foley, atmosphere and music on separate tracks meant I could rebalance the razor against the score repeatedly without rebuilding anything, and that mattered because the balance between those two is the whole tone of the film. I also worked on duplicate timelines so I could compare two cutting rhythms directly instead of destroying the earlier one.

Colour was graded in DaVinci Resolve. A warm tungsten LUT went on the barber shop material and teal-leaning cool tones on the garage, so the two spaces stay separate even in fast cuts — without that, the cross-cutting would have turned into visual mush. Foley was cleaned and amplified in Adobe Audition, which is where the razor sound was really made; the recorded version was far too quiet to carry the scene.

Online tools ran through the whole project rather than sitting at the end. Google Drive held assets and cuts shared with Rayyan, and every planning document is a Google Doc so both of us could work on it at once. YouTube was both the research archive and the eventual home for the film. Pinterest and Unsplash held the moodboards the lighting design was built from.

This portfolio site is the last link in the chain. It is a custom build on my own domain rather than a template, with the written work stored separately from the design so it can be updated without rebuilding the site. Putting the film in front of an audience turned out to be its own technical problem, separate from making it.