Reseacrh and Planning: Case Study - Shifty

Institutional Case Study- A2 Media Studies

‘Shifty’ (2008) – Eran Creevey

Basic Facts:

Running Time: 86 minutes

HE Certificate: 15

DVD Release Date: January 1st, 2009

DVD Initial Price (RRP): £4.44

Blu Ray Price: £8.91

‘Shifty’ was directed and written by Eran Creevey in 2008 and released under the genre of Thriller, however evidently a thriller created inside a social realist theme. It’s a film about a young crack dealer in South London, and his attempt to deal with the situations he faces day-to-day in his job. Chased by an addicted customer, and slowly being rejected by his family this film really does emphasise the true brutality and reality faced by a drug dealer who has become unorganised and set up through rivalry and jealousy. This is the exact intention of those who direct and produce films evolving around the idea of realism in society, in this specific case it shows the negativity drugs brings to not only and individual, but a society as well as testing the line of friendship between humans.

The production company in this film was Between the Eyes who has also worked on other films, and was the reason one of the main actor Riz Ahmed wanted the role, as he had previous encounters with this production company as it helped him in the music industry earlier on in his career. The box office results: 244, 579. This film was very low budget, as it simply doesn’t need much addition as it’s all filmed on location to reflect realism. It took a whole 14 days to shoot this film, as its all based around 1 estate in London. This was due to a scheme that tests directors to film low budget films, called the ‘Microwave Scheme’ and stay within this budget, something Evan Creevy opted to challenge. Also, BBC worked closely with this film, with the full intent to help promote the micro-budget film, as they are a large and powerful dominance in British Television therefore could use adverts to help get the film across the British public, for low cost, over all helping the promotion of the film.

Metronome was the main distribution company for this film, as research shows that the bigger distribution companies labelled ‘Shifty’ as a film that was too small for their idea. In an interview, Evan said that he personally thought the representatives from Metronome have the greatest creative flair and seem to show the most passion in ideas.

  

 

And the choice of main colours (black, yellow) worked well together and made the poster stand out, gain more appeal and was therefore easier on the public eye, later described by a critic to have used “intelligent, bold colours”. Laid out with the two main characters on the front, one critic claimed it to “set the film up lovely, with the identification of the characters we come to follow and we seem to become attached to as the film progresses”. The reviews give the poster 4.

The Trailer: This allowed the British Public to gain an interpretation of the film from the director’s perspective as he ordered the trailer to interest the British Public. It also can help them to gain high expectations of the film which will then allow them to then go on and watch the film at the cinema.

The digital strategies used by Metronome was the creation of the website, which allowed users to send a fake email to friends which allowed them to trick them into thinking they were going to arrested for drug use (“Criminal Investigation”), this was an attraction to young people as they all felt the need to be a part of this prank. Facebook and Myspace both had pages created helping promote the film as well as interviews with the characters were being released over the Internet for fans use, and for the general public to stumble across whilst browsing, these techniques proved vital in the promotion of the film ‘Shifty’.