Awards Season, Modern Classic Documentaries, and Surveys of Master Filmmakers
Happy New Year, ShotDeck community!
Thank you to all of you who hung out with us at Sundance this year. It was especially exciting to meet so many people who’ve been using ShotDeck for years, including for films that they brought to this year’s festival. Our Last Call Party, Shot Talk event with the filmmakers of The Invite and “The Big Dig” networking event were all sold out, and it was amazing to meet filmmakers and film enthusiasts from all over the country and the world. Check out our Instagram for some of the highlights of what we got up to – and we’ll see you in Boulder in 2027!
We have a massive 2026 planned, with a whole host of new features and curations that are going to redefine how you search for inspiration through our library. As you prepare your creative projects for the year ahead, be sure to sign up today for a free 2 week trial of ShotDeck, or download our app from the App Store.
We dropped over 49,000 new shots into our library this month from an incredible array of titles. Take a closer look at what we curated.
FILM COLLECTION
New Releases
The start of a new year means awards season is here, which means a whole host of new release titles have dropped on ShotDeck!
Check out frames from Sentimental Value, Lurker, Shelby Oaks, Twinless, The Baltimorons, Blue Moon, Good Fortune, Die, My Love, The Running Man, Anemone, Regretting You and Christy, and add them to your decks today.
FILM COLLECTION
Acclaimed 21st Century Documentaries
As the first quarter of the century draws to a close, we wanted to put together a collection of some of the most influential documentary films of the past 25 years. This January, ShotDeck dropped thousands of shots from twelve iconic documentaries, each of which reflect the modern era of nonfiction storytelling with bold stories that challenge those in power, explore hidden corners of history, and uncover deep-rooted questions about personal identity, all while pushing the formal boundaries of the medium.
Add shots to your decks from historical studies Deaf President Now! (2025), Occupied City (2023) and They Shall Not Grow Old (2018); ecological activist films The Deepest Breath (2023) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006); the concert musical Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé (2019); sociological studies Daughters (2024) and American Factory (2019); and political confrontations to power No Other Land (2024), Icarus (2017), Sugarcane (2024) and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022).
TELEVISION SERIES
Stranger Things – Season 5
This month, we dropped thousands of shots from the blockbuster television event of the year so far, Stranger Things – Season 5.
Created by Ross and Matt Duffer, the series follows a group of friends and their families in 1980s Indiana who search for answers after witnessing a series of supernatural events and secret government cover-ups that come to rock them and their small town to its core. The hit series has run for almost ten years, starring Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, David Harbour, Winona Ryder, Natalia Dyer, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke and Cara Buono.
Series production designer Chris Trujillo, who had been with the show since its inception, worked with the Duffer brothers on a practical-led set design that would seek to ground the show in as much reality as possible in order to sell its supernatural elements. Trujillo worked closely with location manager Tony Holley to find real locations around the Atlanta area that would speak to the period and midwestern setting of the series, and all built sets were informed by the practical exterior locations they were based on – down to the placement of windows, building materials, and the width of corridors. Trujillo, set decorator Jess Royal and their teams committed to practical production design work even for the most fantastical scenes, building an enormous sculptural “Pain Tree” based on concept designer Michael Maher’s drawings, studying internal organs to create the feeling of entering a “belly of the beast”, and designing all components to be light and modular to maximize shooting flexibility.
Watch Chris’s set tour videos (part 1 and part 2) with Architectural Digest to learn more.
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Ingmar Bergman
This January, we added thousands of shots to our library from twelve pioneering works in the filmography of one of world cinema’s towering giants, Ingmar Bergman. Bergman started out as an assistant director for stage, and after directing several of his own plays, he wrote the screenplay for the 1944 film Torment, which was directed by Alf Sjöberg (though Bergman himself directed some of the exterior sequences of the film). Two years later, he directed his first film, Crisis, setting off a remarkable run of releasing one (and often two) films almost every subsequent year all the way until 1978.
Bergman had a complicated and at times fraught childhood and young adult life, but grew to be one of the great humanists and philosophers of 20th century cinema, celebrated by audiences, critics and filmmakers alike for the way his films mined the complexities of human behavior with deep sincerity, but without ever seeking the obvious. His films often dealt with the meaning of death, faith and love, pushing the boundaries of conventional storytelling along with the formal boundaries of the medium itself, via his celebrated partnerships with actors such as Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Bjornsstrand, and Max Von Sydow, as well as two of the most revered cinematographers of all time, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist.
Dive into this month’s curation of Bergman’s filmography – sexual thriller The Silence (1963), romantic drama Summer with Monika (1953), psychological drama The Magician (1958), musical fantasy The Magic Flute (1975), medieval revenge tragedy The Virgin Spring (1960), horror film Hour of the Wolf (1968), romantic drama The Passion of Anna (1969), romantic comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), romantic drama Summer Interlude (1951), drama tragedy Winter Light (1963), family drama Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and romantic drama Sawdust and Tinsel (1953).
TELEVISION SERIES
Pluribus
The blockbuster TV shows keep coming! This month, we dropped the first season of Pluribus into our library. Created by Vince Gilligan and starring Rhea Seehorn, the series follows Albuquerque-based novelist Carol Sturka, who finds herself suddenly isolated after an alien virus transforms the rest of humanity into a hive mind called the Joining.
Series cinematographer Marshall Adams, who also worked with Gilligan on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, shot the series on an Arri Alexa Mini LF with Panavision Panaspeed lenses, building a look for the show inspired by 50s and 60s street photography with a noticeable Kodachrome feel to the image. Adams shot the series in a 2.39 aspect ratio for a pronounced cinematic quality, with wider compositions often pushing the visual language of the series away from traditional television coverage. By anchoring the perspective of the show firmly with Carol, Adams and his team were able to build a distinct visual style that at once held the realism of their New Mexico location photography, as well as embrace the science fiction and post-apocalyptic elements of the story. Check out Marshall’s interview with FilmSpeak to hear more about how they did it.
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Robert Altman
In January, we curated a selection of ten films from one of the most enduring figures of the New Hollywood movement, Robert Altman.
For one of the most celebrated filmmakers of his generation, Altman’s path to directing films was a relatively long and winding one. At the age of 18, Altman joined the US Air Force as a bomber pilot, and after a failed attempt to launch a career as a writer in New York City, he returned to his hometown of Kansas City where he directed industrial films and documentaries for the Calvin Company. In 1957, he wrote, produced and directed his first feature film, The Delinquents, for a budget of $63,000 (equivalent to roughly $730,000 today). The film was purchased by United Artists, and it allowed Altman to move to California and begin working consistently as a television director – but it would be another ten years before his next film, Countdown, was released – that too with him fired from the project within days of its release due to his refusal to edit the film in length. Two years later, he released That Cold Day in the Park (1969) – a critical and box office failure, but a crucial film for Altman that established core aspects of his style and set up a rhythm of working that allowed him to release at least one film almost every year for close to the next three decades.
Over the course of his feature film career, Altman established a reputation of being a maverick, avant-garde filmmaker who managed to find mainstream audiences despite a distinctly satirical, anti-Hollywood, anti-establishment approach to both the orthodoxy of filmmaking practices and the subject matter of his films. He often worked with large ensemble casts and pioneered a multitrack recording technique for overlapping dialogue that would influence filmmakers for generations to come. His visual style was similarly electric, with constant movement, prolific use of zoom lenses and a reverence for naturalism creating an idiosyncratic signature on his work that filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson continue to cite as some of their strongest influences.
Take a deep dive into one of America’s filmmaking treasures, with musical comedy A Prairie Home Companion (2006), political drama Secret Honor (1984), gangster drama Kansas City (1996), fantasy comedy Brewster McCloud (1970), psychological horror Images (1972), thriller mystery masterpiece The Long Goodbye (1973), small town dramedy Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), music romance The Company (2003), and gambling dramedy California Split (1974). Enjoy!
FILM COLLECTION
Music Videos and Commercials
We’ve got a bumper new crop of music videos and commercials for you, with over 10,000 shots from 100 music videos and commercials each freshly dropped into our library. Check out new release music video titles from the biggest names in modern hip hop, alternative rock and dance electronic music, and commercials for video games, gyms, and international airlines. Add them to your decks today!
