Our biggest ever year! Filmmaker Deep Dives, Awards Season Contenders and Action Overloads
Happy Holidays, ShotDeck community!
What a year it has been! First of all, a huge congratulations to all of you who submitted work for the 2025 ShotDeck Recreations Contest. This year’s crop of recreations was our biggest and best yet, and we are so inspired by the incredible work you all made. Check out our Instagram page for this year’s winners, and start coming up with your ideas for next year’s contest!
It’s been a milestone year for us at ShotDeck – we dropped over 750,000 new shots from more than 950 films, 875 episodes of television, and 2,300 music videos and commercials. We dove deep into the filmographies of iconic directors, cinematographers and production designers, added shots covering film movements from around the world and throughout history to our libraries, and curated themed drops from rom-coms to science fiction, monster horror and everything in between. What a ride!
As you plan your creative projects for 2026, be sure to sign up today for a free 2 week trial of ShotDeck, download our app from the App Store, or access ShotDeck via Canva, where our official integration gives you access to the entire ShotDeck library directly within Canva’s interface.
We’re closing out the year with an almighty bang – this December, we added over 100,000 new shots to our library! Take a closer look at what we curated below.
FILM COLLECTION
2025 New Releases
As awards season gets into full swing, we’ve been dropping thousands of shots from some of the year’s most popular new titles into our library.
Check out new shots from Train Dreams,The History of Sound,Ballad of a Small Player,Bugonia, Highest 2 Lowest,A House of Dynamite,If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Long Walk,The Roses, Wicked; For Good, Black Phone 2,Eleanor the Great, and Roofman. Add them to your decks today!
TELEVISION SERIES
Dr. Who
Allons-y! This month, we dropped a massive 50 episodes from the iconic British sci-fi television series, Doctor Who.
The longest-running science fiction series of all time was first created in 1963 by Sydney Newman, C.E. Webber and Donald Wilson, and follows the adventures of an extraterrestrial being named The Doctor, who is a part of a humanoid species known as the Time Lords and travels in a spaceship called the TARDIS, working to help save Earth from the dangers that face it. Able to regenerate their biology and reincarnate their form, The Doctor has appeared in a number of different physical forms, and the series has starred many different actors down the generations in its 890+ episode run. Fourteen actors have played the titular role, and recent incarnations of The Doctor have been played by the likes of Christopher Eccleston, Jodie Whittaker, David Tennant, Matt Smith and Ncuti Gatwa. Over time, Dr. Who has not only become a staple of British television culture, but it has become an international cult classic, and one of the most revered and referenced television series of all time.
Dive into our hand-picked selection of episodes, including Parting of the Ways, The Pandora Opens, Heaven Sent, and many more. Geronimo!
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Frank Capra
It wouldn’t be the holiday season without Frank Capra!
This month, we dropped eight films from the Italian-American master filmmaker’s catalogue. Born the youngest of seven children in Sicily, Capra’s family immigrated to the United States in 1903, when he was five years old. The family settled in Los Angeles’s East Side, where Capra’s father worked as a fruit picker. Capra studied chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology before being drafted into the US Army, teaching mathematics to artillerymen in San Francisco. It was during this time that he directed his first film – a 32 minute documentary about the visit of the Italian naval vessel Libya to San Francisco. Four years later, he made his feature directorial debut with the silent film The Strong Man (1926).
Capra’s body of work is among the most celebrated in the history of Hollywood. His films are venerated for their warmth, quick wit and empathy, for their fast-talking characters and extraordinary circumstances, embracing life’s absurdities while also affirming the lives of ordinary people. Take a closer look at the shots from this month’s curation – crime comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), dramedies Meet John Doe (1941) and Pocketful of Miracles(1961), romantic comedies Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can’t Take It With You (1938), screwball comedy Lady for a Day (1933), romantic drama The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), and adventure fantasy Lost Horizon (1937).
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Ernst Lubitsch
In December, we added a selection of 8 films from beloved German-American filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch to the ShotDeck library. Born in 1892 into a Jewish family in Berlin, Lubitsch left his father’s tailoring business to enter Max Reinhardt‘s Deutsches Theater in 1911, and acted in approximately 30 films between then and 1920. Over those nine years, Lubitsch began transitioning into directing, and he directed himself in his last acting performance in the 1920 film Sumurun. By the early 1920s, Lubtisch was an internationally acclaimed director with over 40 credits to his name, and he left Germany for the United States in 1922 to begin directing silent films in Hollywood.
Lubitsch directed a number of silent films under contract for Warner Bros., MGM and Paramount respectively before making the switch to sound films in 1929, and it was here that his reputation for being one of the most sophisticated and visually elegant filmmakers in the world was cemented. The wit, sensitivity and visual innovation of his films earned his new releases the tagline of having “the Lubitsch touch”, and by the time of his death in 1947, he had left one of the most influential legacies of any early Hollywood filmmaker.
Add shots from our curation of Ernst Lubitsch movies to your decks today – the Greta Garbo romantic comedy Ninotchka (1939), 1940 masterpiece The Shop Around the Corner, operetta adaptation The Merry Widow (1934), the afterlife comedy starring Don Ameche Heaven Can Wait (1943), war comedy To Be Or Not To Be (1942), romantic satire Design for Living (1933), screwball comedy Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), and his final film, Cluny Brown (1946).
TELEVISION SERIES
Slow Horses
This month, we released over 6,500 new shots from the entirety of the smash-hit British spy thriller television series, Slow Horses. Created by Will Smith and based on the series of novels by Mick Herron, the series follows the Slough House MI5 unit, where disgraced or failed secret agents are consigned. The dysfunctional unit is led by notorious curmudgeon Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), and together, they reluctantly navigate the espionage world’s smoke and mirrors to defend England from sinister forces. The series also stars the likes of Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas and Saskia Reeves.
Series cinematographer Danny Cohen was attracted to the series’s “anti-thriller” possibilities – the way that the show was not “trying to make London or the characters look sexy and beautiful, so it lent itself towards a much grittier, harder look. He shot the series on the Arri Alexa Mini LF for its softer look, paired with Panavision lenses that were fast, could cover the sensor, and had some contrast in their color rendition. While the Slough House offices were built on a set, the series features a lot of exterior location photography, and the offices were therefore shot with soft, “neutral” lighting setups that maximized flexibility as scenes and sequences followed characters from inside to outside and vice versa.
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Walter Hill
This month, we shone a spotlight on the filmography of Walter Hill, dropping thousands of shots from 12 of his films. A pioneering American filmmaker credited with reviving the Western genre and redefining the visual possibilities of action films, Hill was born in Long Beach, California and studied art at the Universidad de las Américas in Mexico City before transferring to Michigan State University to study history. After university, he returned to Los Angeles, where he worked researching historical documentaries, before entering a training program at the Directors Guild of America that led to a number of jobs as an assistant director. Through these years, Hill was writing scripts of his own, and after years of selling scripts, he directed his first film,Hard Times, in 1975.
Hill worked at a frantic pace from the late 70s all the way to the early 2000s, almost never letting more than two years pass between releasing a film he directed. In this almost three decade run, Hill became celebrated as one of America’s most audacious action and western filmmakers, and directed celebrated classics including The Warriors(1979), 48 Hrs.(1982), Another 48 Hrs.(1990), Southern Comfort(1981) and The Driver(1978). Check out stills from those films, as well as from Brewster’s Millions (1985), Red Heat (1988), Last Man Standing (1996), Crossroads (1986), Extreme Prejudice (1987), and Bullet to the Head (2013).
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Pedro Costa
In December, we dropped thousands of shots from the filmography of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, whose internationally acclaimed films blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction, often shining a spotlight on marginalized characters and communities. Born and raised in Lisbon, where his films are primarily set, Costa studied at both the University of Lisbon and the Lisbon Theatre and Film School, where he studied under director António Reis. Costa’s first film, Blood, was released in 1989, and was selected as Portugal’s submission for the Academy Awards. Since then, his films have received acclaim on the international festival stage, with 2006’s Colossal Youth nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, 2014’s Horse Money winning the award for Best Direction at the Locarno Film Festival, and 2019’s Vitalina Varela winning Locarno’s Golden Leopard for Best Film.
Check out those titles as well as the rest of this month’s curation of Pedro Costa films – immigrant drama Ossos (1997), the Cape Verde-set drama Casa de Lava (1995), the compilation of docushorts Historic Centre (2012), and docufiction film In Vanda’s Room (2000). Add them to your decks today!
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Michelle Yeoh vs Jackie Chan
It’s the ultimate martial arts battle! This month, we dropped seven films from two of the world’s most iconic action stars: Michelle Yeoh and Jackie Chan. Peers in the Hong Kong martial arts film scene who met on a Guy Laroche commercial in 1984, Yeoh and Chan were each on individual trajectories as performers before they starred together in Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992). Since then, they have both forged careers both in Asian cinema and abroad as some of the most influential action performers of all time, known for their pioneering, death-defying stunts, their astonishing choreography, artistry and comedic timing.
So jump into the middle of this epic showdown! Add shots to your decks from Dragons Forever (1988), Yes, Madam! (1985), Magnificent Warriors (1987), Tai-Chi Master (1993), Armour of God (1986), and The Legend of Drunken Master (1994).
FILM COLLECTION
Cyberpunk Action Overload
Had enough action yet? In December, we also programmed a curation of cyberpunk action films to send your holiday season into overdrive. A beloved cult subgenre of the science fiction genre, cyberpunk films often blend high-tech neon futures with dystopian societies decaying from the greed of corporations and political elites. Punk rebellion lone warriors often collide head-on with advanced cyber technologies and artificial intelligence in rain-soaked, gritty cities, and these films have often proved to be oddly prophetic about the state of the world.
This month’s selection of 70s, 80s and 90s cyberpunk action films are among the genre’s most defining entries, with bold imagination and explosive action filmmaking creating cult masterpieces. Check out stills from Total Recall (1990), Robocop 2 (1990), Rollerball (1975), The Running Man (1987), Cherry 2000 (1987), Hardware (1990), Demolition Man (1993), Robot Jox (1989) and Futureworld (1976).
FILM COLLECTION
Mega Music Videos and Commercials
To round out 2025, we dropped a massive 43,000 shots from 700 music videos and commercials! Keep an eye out for music videos from contemporary hip hop, 2010s indie rock, new release K-Pop hits, and everything in between, as well as commercials from major sportswear brands, luxury cars, fashion houses and even film festivals!
MUSIC VIDEOZeyne – “7arrir 3aqlak, Asli Ana”
COMMERCIALVogue – “Born in the Mediterranean”
MUSIC VIDEODavid Sylvian – “Red Guitar” 
