One evening this month, Faraday Okoro was sitting in a sound studio in Chelsea, putting the final touches on his first feature film. Onscreen, one of the main characters had just picked up a beaded necklace, and Mr. Okoro, leaning back into his chair with a can of seltzer in his hand, was questioning whether the rattle of the beads could be heard clearly enough. In front of him, a sound engineer pressed pause, punched a series of commands into a keyboard, and played the scene again. The beads were louder.

Mr. Okoro nodded.

“I think it’s good,” he said softly, and sipped from the can.

Mr. Okoro, 31, was impressively calm. He had just days before the film needed to be finished, a milestone that would mark the end of a year of life-changing turbulence, one that began last spring, at a luncheon where he learned that he’d won $1 million.

At the time, Mr. Okoro had directed only short films. A graduate student at New York University, he was among five finalists for an award being given by AT&T, the Tribeca Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Institute to a promising young filmmaker, with a focus on underrepresented perspectives. After a game-show-like pitch-off that Mr. Okoro prepared for, in part, by recording himself delivering a 10-minute presentation and repeatedly playing it back through headphones, he won the transformative grant. His thesis project would have a million-dollar budget. But the money came with pressure.

“It’s much different than winning the lottery,” he said this month, “because I still had to make the movie for it to mean anything. And I could really feel that.”