01 / The question
At 3:17 a.m., a city can look abandoned. It isn’t. Somewhere, someone is unlocking a bakery, closing a pharmacy, cleaning a train. Morning is being assembled by people most of us will never meet.
Small Hours begins with a question: what changes about a place when you learn the names of the people who keep it running?
The proposed film follows one night through three intersecting working lives. The participants, city, and precise route would be chosen through reporting and consent. No invented interviews. No synthetic person presented as a real witness.
02 / An opening to go and find
Begin before an explanation. A key enters a lock. A fluorescent tube takes a second to wake. Flour lands on a counter. A hand wipes a bus windscreen.
Each sound belongs to a real action, recorded in the place where it happens. We don’t yet show a face. We show what a person makes possible.
The first interview question is simple: “When people ask what you do, what part do they never understand?” The answer determines the next scene. The film follows what is found, rather than making a person fit a script.
03 / The promise
By sunrise, the same street should look different to the viewer. Not because the street has changed, but because anonymity has.
AI could help plan coverage, organize a transcript, or create clearly labeled illustrative transitions. The people, testimony, and factual claims must come from documented sources. Any reconstruction would be disclosed in the film itself.
This is a documentary proposal, not a report of completed fieldwork. Source collection, participant consent, interview recording, and factual review are required before production or publication. Atmosphere imagery is illustrative.
Where would you take it?
Bring this opening, its characters, and its world into your studio. The next creative decision is yours.
Start with this concept