Capability Statement
Michael Shafia produces film, television, and video. Over thirteen years he has led commercial, branded, and unscripted productions for national brands, broadcast networks, and the largest digital platforms, serving as executive producer, senior producer, and post producer. He carries a project from first concept through final delivery: shaping the idea, negotiating budgets and vendor agreements, hiring and directing the crew, and supervising post through to a finished file delivered on specification.
Core competencies
- Film and video production across the full project lifecycle: development, scripting, shoot, and final delivery.
- Commercial and branded content for national brands, broadcast networks, and digital platforms.
- Live event and broadcast performance production, including awards-show segments and live musical performances.
- Livestream and social-media campaign production.
- Documentary and docu-series production, including field shoots, interviews, and story-driven editing.
- Music video and photography production and direction.
- Post-production supervision through editorial, color, sound, and delivery to specification.
- Production management and business affairs: budgeting, scheduling, vendor and talent negotiation, and resource allocation across concurrent productions.
Approach
Every project runs through a single accountable producer. From kickoff, that means one source of truth for the budget and schedule, and one person who owns the chain of decisions that turns a brief into a delivered file. Creative leads, vendors, and crew talk to one person; the client talks to one person; nothing slips into the gap between departments because there isn’t one. Decisions stay fast, budgets stay disciplined, and the change orders that quietly kill margins get caught at the moment they’re proposed instead of weeks later in post.
Across thirteen years, Shafia has run productions on compressed network timelines and at festival pace, across multiple locations, and often with concurrent shoots and overlapping post calendars. The day-to-day work is vendor and talent negotiation, budget control through actuals tracking, schedule construction backwards from delivery, crew assembly that matches the register of the project, and post-production supervision through editorial, color, sound, and final QC against broadcast or platform specifications. He works in both union and non-union contexts.
He co-produced Two Distant Strangers, winner of the 2021 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, and has produced for MTV (Chappell Roan’s VMAs performance), national advertisers (Honda, Bud Light, Acura, American Express, 19 Crimes, Time Warner), digital comedy (Funny or Die), and original documentary work (The Making of Legacy of Kain: Ascendance, produced and directed). That range lets him match the register of each project, whether an awards-show performance pulled together in days, a national ad campaign with weeks of pre, or a documentary’s months of patience, without forcing one shape onto the other.
He is currently production managing an experiential event in Florida for the watch company Panerai.