We looked at a few trailers, including 'Fish Tank' and 'Shifty', that both are classed as a social realist films that each portray their own views on Urban Britain. In this particular blog, we will focus on Shifty. Shifty is an Urban Britain thriller, produced and written by Eran Creevey, and released on the 29th April, 2009. It follows the life of a young London drug dealer who sells drugs in the estate where he lives, competing with rivals. His old buddy turns up Chris, who has moved away from their childhood to own a house with a mortgage, a good job and a family on the way or in his mind.
Moving away from the plot, this trailer consists of short and quick clips that jump to places randomly to help tell the story and sell their idea. With this fast pace, follows a very clever technique intentionally used by Creevey in the making of the trailer, this technique is using the pace to reflect the atmosphere and the drug effect. This is one thing we wanted to do, and used this research to contribute to our film. As our film is also about the drug life, and how it can affect a life, we closely analysed this trailer as it was a success, and we intended to use this as a guideline in how to make a successful social realist film, based around the ideas of drugs. This pace was created through the editing style, and how the jump allows the story to be told quicker, and although we didn't use this technique, we did use the idea of quick pace to show how drugs jumbles the mind into confusion and everything around you becomes out of time, and it was important for us for the audience to interpret this particular feeling the drugs can give a human. This followed the intention we had to negatively portray drugs, as no-one would like to have a confused mind where everything seems surreal or out of the norm.
Shifty didn't use graphics like us, yet it told the story in a different way. This was one we considered, but didn't have the skill to execute. This was the 'jump' to different stages of the film and the trailer basically informed the audience of most of the locations featured in the film.
Another similar technique we used along with Shifty, was the specific focus on the main characters, and how they featured in every clip. This focus in a technique we chose to follow as we knew it was important in the identification of the costume and character, which from the feedback we gained was important in relating to the genre.
We also completed a poster analysis of the Shifty poster, and researched into why they chose the colours they did, and how important this is to a film poster in the social realist genre. The poster is dominantly yellow and black in terms of background, and colour scheme that we also followed, not copied. We though the colour scheme worked well, and suited the background we chose, and shifty had great poster reviews, so we opted to follow the colour scheme of a bright text colour, yet a gloomy background of the wall, tattered and old. Shifty is mainly bright, which was technique we did not want due to the idea we wanted to remain that sense of negativity behind drugs, and emphasise also that his film isn't one with a happy outcome. In terms of the layout, we took our own instinct and judged it for yourself, trying out different positions and finalising with the one we kept. The use of the two main actors on the front is something we considered, but did nor chose to follow for two reasons, to similar to Shifty and we felt that our actor Dom (ty) looked better alone on the wall, and suite the wall more than Lara did, helping the audience identify an idea of social realism from the image.
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