Hamza Sajid — Cambridge International AS Level Media Studies (9607) Foundation Portfolio, candidate 0014, centre P1025. IL FAVORE, a neo-noir film opening by Il Matto Films.

IL FAVORE uses the visual codes of neo-noir and the mafia film accurately enough that an audience understands it in the first ten seconds. Then it breaks two conventions on purpose.

I led the camera, the edit, the grade and the sound. My teammate Rayyan Usman led the story and plays the barber. We directed it together, and each of us learned the other's side: he learned the edit with me, and I learned story writing with him.

The codes we kept are nearly all in the first half minute. Low-key chiaroscuro on the card table at 0:06, lit by a single spotlight. That came from Gordon Willis's underexposure in The Godfather (1972), which gave us permission to let faces sit in shadow. Bodyguards in black, sunglasses indoors, a boss holding cards while the two of them stand behind him. 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. A convoy of SUVs comes down the ramp later, at 1:02. None of that needs explaining because the genre has trained people to read it. Our rough-cut screening backed this up. The lighting, the costume and the cold-against-warm contrast communicated the genre on their own, so we cut dialogue and voiceover completely.

We kept the genre's editing too. The film cross-cuts between the barber shop, the basement and the elevator, so the audience puts the collision together before anyone on screen does. It also follows the institutional conventions of a film opening. The Il Matto Films ident comes first, the credits run over the action, and the title is held back until after the gunshot.

What we changed is where and how power is established. Crime openings typically construct threat in dark back rooms and deliver it through dialogue. The Godfather does exactly that, with a favour asked for in a dark office. We used spatial contrast instead. At 1:10 the elevator doors open on the mafia boss. His entry is slow and deliberate.

The second departure is that nobody is hurt on screen. Eastern Promises (2007) puts violence in a grooming space and films it without flinching. We took the setting and inverted the outcome.

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.

0:53

Sound does the same job. I put "Me and My Shadow" (1927) over the shave so the music pulls against the picture, which is what I took from Drive (2011). The only violent act is the gunshot at the end, and we hear it over black.

the same palette, but settled and untouchable. One is being looked at. The other is doing the looking, and the high-angle mirror shots at 0:36 and 0:59 make that literal by showing the customer watched from angles he cannot see. The audience knows more than the character. He is the Fool that Il Matto Films is named after.

Finally, we accepted that some people will just watch this for the way it looks. Stuart Hall would call that a negotiated reading. They take the style and miss that the danger is in the wrong room. In under two minutes you can't expect an audience to read classic mob-film codes and notice them being broken at the same time. Six of the ten people at the screening also said the opening held too long, so I trimmed it. And the entry at 1:29, where the break finally pays off, is the scene I would reshoot, because it is not as dramatic as the build-up promises.

Our audience is 16 to 35, B and C1, streaming-first, and it splits two ways. Mainstream filmgoers who like a thriller, and cinephiles who follow directors instead of franchises. Both would rather be trusted than explained to, and both will sit through a slow opening if they can feel it building toward something.

takes over, a 1927 recording that makes the warm room feel safe and slightly out of its own time. Since the theme never cuts, the two rooms are never really separate, even when the picture is. The music is what tells you they're happening at the same moment. It's also what tells you the basement is already in the barber shop.

I picked the most recognisable score in crime cinema on purpose. Four bars and the audience knows what kind of film this is. In 110 seconds I don't have time to earn that with an original cue.

The ending pulls the floor out. At 1:40 I cut every track to silence, then the gunshot, then "Take Me Home, Country Roads" over black. A song about going home, playing over a man who isn't.

Two things changed after testing. We showed the rough cut to ten people and six said the opening dragged, so I trimmed it. It came back tenser, not slower. We also found the warm-cold contrast was carrying the genre on its own, so we cut the exposition completely. No dialogue, no voiceover, nothing that explains itself. The teaser then went out on Instagram and YouTube before the full cut, and an Instagram poll of 23 voters gave us real reactions to work against instead of assumptions.

The film never names the favour. You leave still guessing. Stuart Hall's point is that audiences decode a text for themselves, and an opening that explains nothing leaves them more room to do it. It's also why people talk about it. Jenkins' spreadable media needs something to argue over, and 110 unresolved seconds gives them that.

As a real media text this is the opening of an independent feature, not a short film. No stars, high concept, so a major studio is out. A24 or Neon is realistic because they buy directors. The route starts at festivals, Venice or SXSW or Tribeca, because selection is the only thing that works when you can't buy marketing. After that comes a limited cinema release that widens if word of mouth builds, then MUBI for the streaming window, since they programme for this exact audience. It would carry a 15 certificate for sustained threat and an implied killing, which still fits a 16 to 35 audience. The opening also works on its own as a calling card, and Vimeo Staff Picks and Short of the Week are where distributors actually find people at this level.

One thing would have to change for a real release. The Godfather theme and "Country Roads" are under copyright, and licensing them would cost more than the whole film did. A distributor would need an original score that does the same job. The shortcut I took in 110 seconds is one a real feature could not take.

Marketing at our level would be close to free. Vertical cut-downs of the elevator reveal for TikTok and Reels, because the genre reads off a single still. Character stills printed as tarot cards, tied to Il Matto, which is The Fool, the card of the man who walks into a room he shouldn't. The poster carries the same line as the film, the debt no one asked for. That costs nothing but design time.

The skill that changed most wasn't a camera skill. It was planning.

In one of the preliminary exercises I shot without a written scene-by-scene and lost the sequence. I came out with footage I couldn't cut into anything and had to throw the whole video away. The angles were fine. I just didn't know what order I'd shot in or what was missing until I was in the edit, which is the worst possible place to find out.

So before IL FAVORE I wrote every scene out in order first. We had one day because of cast availability, so there was no second chance at anything.

The day tested it hard. The costumes we'd planned weren't available, so we switched which actor played which part and rebuilt the casting around the suits we actually had. That cost hours, and by the time we were ready it was dark. The barber shop we'd picked was a good location in daylight, but at night it ran on hard white overheads, and white light in the warm room would have destroyed the contrast the entire film is built on. So we moved to a salon with warm LEDs and a private suite.

That's the decision I'm proudest of, and I could only make it because I already knew what the warm room had to do. Before this project I'd have shot it anyway and told myself I'd fix the colour later.

We had no briefcase either. I used a bag from my car with the LED inside it, so it lit its own contents and read as a real source on camera. It took five positions to find the one that lit the contents without blowing out the frame.

Editing taught me that shot length is an argument. Hold the barber shop too long and the mafia thread stops feeling like it's closing in. Cut to the basement too often and the shave stops being calm enough to unnerve anyone. The slow-motion elevator reveal at 1:10 only holds because everything around it is short.

The exercises are in the finished film. It opens on shoes climbing marble stairs, which is the continuity edit almost shot for shot. It ends at 1:40 on black with a gunshot entirely offscreen, which is the one-frame exercise scaled up to a whole ending.

Colour is where I can see the difference most clearly. My first grade, on the 180-degree exercise, doesn't balance. Skin and background pull against each other, and I didn't have the vocabulary to say why. On IL FAVORE I shot in Log and built three separate looks, neutral outdoors, cold for the basement and warm for the shop, and they stay separate even under fast cutting.

Sound is where I did the most careful work. In the exercise I placed one footstep. Here I ran the Godfather theme unbroken across the parallel edit, up over the basement and ducked under "Me and My Shadow" in the shop, so the two rooms never fully separate even when the picture cuts. I kept the bats that were in the basement recording, because they put something alive in a dead space.

I also learned story writing from Rayyan, who led that side, while he learned the edit with me.

And for all the planning, I hand-picked an outfit for every person in the film and forgot the barber's apron. The one costume the plan didn't cover is the one missing from the frame. The ending is the same lesson. I planned it as a scene but not shot by shot, and it is the weakest thing in the film. Next time I would storyboard the climax and scout the location at the hour I'm actually shooting.

Technology worked as a chain on this film, not a list of kit. Every decision at one stage decided what was still possible at the next. The hardware set the limits, the software worked inside them, and the online tools got the film to an audience.

Everything was shot on an iPhone 17 Pro, 4K, 24fps, ProRes Log. Nothing else. No Cinematic mode, no second camera, and on the day the only things I changed were exposure and zoom. Log footage looks flat and grey out of the camera, which is the point.

It holds detail in the highlights and shadows and pushes every real decision about the image into the grade, so shooting Log meant committing to doing the work later.

One shot shows the chain better than the rest. At 1:25 I needed the mafia entering and every character in the same frame, and the salon room was too small for it. I ended up pressed into a corner shooting at 0.5x on the ultra-wide, which is the noisiest lens on the phone. That noise then became a grading problem, and I solved it by leaning into it, adding grain and halation so the noise reads as film texture instead of a phone struggling in low light. A space limitation turned into a lens choice turned into a noise problem turned into a look.

Slow motion worked the same way. I chose 24fps ProRes Log for the sake of the grade, so I had no high-frame-rate footage to slow down for the elevator reveal. I generated the extra frames afterwards in an iOS app called Time Cut. That is frame interpolation, and it is a substitute for real slow motion. Next time I would decide the frame rate at the shoot.

Everything was handheld. No gimbal, no tripod. That's the clearest limitation in the film and it's why the static shots took the most takes.

Lighting was mostly timing and one lamp. We shot at 6pm for low side light in the basement, and a single emergency LED did four separate jobs: the cars, the barber's face at 0:20, the boss's face as he closes the bag at 0:40, and the inside of the bag itself. I'd bought a warm light for the shoot but my laptop charger died and we lost it, so the warm room came from what the salon already had, dimmed ceiling lights and warm LEDs, plus a ring light set to warm.

The whole film was cut in VN on the same phone that shot it. The grade and the slow motion were done on that phone too, so one device was the camera, the edit suite, the grading desk and the sound mix. That is technological convergence, and it is why two students with no funding could finish a film at all. One main track carries the Godfather theme the whole way, riding up over the mafia scenes and down elsewhere, running until the second-last clip. I used J-cuts into the barber shop so "Me and My Shadow" arrives before the picture does and sounds like a radio already playing in the room. The blade clips bring in suspense music with bass risers and whooshes over it, and risers also mark the card table introduction and the elevator reveal. The bats in the basement aren't added at all. They were in the location audio, which I kept under the score instead of muting it. The score keeps a low pulse under the suspense scenes that only really opens up on a system with proper bass, so the film plays differently on headphones than on a phone speaker.

Colour was graded in the Video LUT app. I started with a LUT, a look-up table that remaps the flat Log colours, in this case the DCI-P3 Kodak 2383 D55 print-film emulation. Then I built my own CDL, light, grain and halation settings on top. Three looks came out of it. Neutral outdoors, cold and dark for the basement, warm bright high-key amber for the salon. That separation is what keeps the parallel edit legible at speed.

Online tools did three jobs. For planning, Rayyan sent a rough sketch of what to shoot over WhatsApp, and the script, storyboard, recce and risk assessment were kept as Google Docs. For feedback, the teaser went out on YouTube and Instagram before the full cut, and an Instagram poll collected 23 votes. For distribution, the film lives on my own hosting, on YouTube and on Google Drive.

The site is the last link. It runs on custom PHP on Hostinger. I built it with Claude Code and a Kling-generated hero video, and the design direction is mine. Getting the film in front of people turned out to be its own technical problem, separate from making it.