JANUARY 2025 DROPS RECAP
IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD JANUARY!
Happy New Year, ShotDeck community!
After a huge 2024, we’re excited to bring you an even bigger and better 2025. We have an amazing line-up of curated titles planned for you, celebrating the very best of this year’s upcoming new releases, classic television series, filmmakers who forever changed world cinema, fun themes to see old favorites in a new light, and a bumper crop of new commercials and music videos. There will be hundreds of thousands of new shots coming your way from across mediums, genres, eras and countries – so get your decks ready!
And that’s not all we have planned! We have a great series of Shot Talks lined up for the year ahead, educational blog posts to help you put together your next creative project, and a host of new features coming to the ShotDeck site and app in 2025.
A reminder that ShotDeck is available in Canva as well! Our official integration gives you access to the entire ShotDeck library directly within Canva’s interface. You can also directly access any decks you’ve built in ShotDeck in Canva.
2025 promises to be a special year, so make sure you sign up today for a free 2 week trial to ShotDeck, giving you full access to the world’s largest library of cinematic reference images. This January, we kicked things off with a bang, adding over 52,000 new shots to our library from a stellar line-up of films and television series. Here’s an overview of what we curated!
MAD MEN
This month, we completed ShotDeck’s Mad Men collection, adding over 16,000 new shots from Seasons 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 to our library. Widely recognized as one of the greatest television series of all time, and a touchstone of the early part of this century’s Golden Age of Television, Mad Men follows Don Dramer (Jon Hamm), the enigmatic creative director of one of Madison Avenue’s coolest advertising agencies. Set from 1960 to 1970, the series follows Don, his family and his coworkers through one of the most tumultuous decades in modern American history.
Created by Matthew Weiner, Mad Men became the first basic cable television series to receive the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series – an accolade it collected for each of its first four seasons. The series also stars the likes of Elisabeth Moss, January Jones, Christina Hendricks, Vincent Kartheiser, John Slattery, Kiernan Shipka, Jessica Paré, Cara Buono and Maggie Siff. Mad Men is today considered one of the most detailed and beautifully-rendered accounts of 1960s America, and every shot is now available to add to your decks – check it out today!
SEVERANCE
Severance is an American science fiction television series created by Dan Erickson. It follows Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott), an employee of Lumon Industries, who has agreed to be a part of a program where work and non-work memories are separated. The series also stars Zach Cherry, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, John Turturro, Christopher Walken, and Patricia Arquette.
Season 1 was a cult smash-hit, celebrated for its dystopian but playful production design and eerily beautiful cinematography (those wide- to long-lens dolly-zooms in the elevators!). Nominated for 14 Primetime Emmy Awards after Season 1, Severance had its fans clamoring for another season at Lumon – which is now available on Apple TV+! But before diving back in, take a trip down memory lane with the stills from Season 1, now on ShotDeck.
TED LASSO
For a change of pace, check out shots from all three seasons of Ted Lasso, the sports comedy series created by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly. Ted Lasso follows a hapless American football coach (Sudeikis) whose optimism and quirky leadership surprisingly lead a struggling English soccer team to new heights. The series also stars the likes of Hannah Waddingham, Phil Dunster, Brett Goldstein, Nick Mohammed, and Juno Temple.
Lead cinematographer David Rom filmed Ted Lasso using an Alexa Mini LF and Tokina Vista lenses, relying on the lenses’ speed (T1.5) and very shallow depth-of-field to visually create a fish-out-of-water story that mirrored the journey of the series’ central characters. Ted Lasso was a feel-good sensation – Season 1 garnered the most Primetime Emmy nominations for any comedy’s first season (20), only to be outmatched by Seasons 2 and 3 – not to mention turning millions of viewers into soccer fans along the way! Check out the stills on ShotDeck today.
AWARDS SEASON CONTENDORS
In January, we added thousands of shots from some of this past year’s biggest Awards Season contenders. We added shots from the International submissions for the 2025 Academy Awards, which includes titles like Flow, Touch, La Luna, Semmelweis and Laapataa Ladies. We also dropped shots from popular Fall titles such as The Apprentice, Conclave, The Wild Robot, We Live in Time, Cuckoo, Thelma, The Beast and Saturday Night. Check them out today!
SERGEI EISENSTEIN
This month, we released shots from four classic entries in the filmography of Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein. One of the original pioneers of cinema, Eisenstein was not only a monumental director of the silent era, but also a film scholar and theorist whose work has helped lay the foundations of the art form itself.
Among his many storytelling and technical innovations, Eisenstein is perhaps best known for his contributions to film editing. Like Lev Kuleshov, whose school he briefly attended, Eisenstein was fascinated by the power of the cut to elicit meaning and emotion. Specifically, Eisenstein examined the ability for the juxtaposition or “collision” of two distinct shots to demonstrate something more meaningful and metaphorical than the story of the narrative itself.
This philosophy is best demonstrated in the films themselves, but Eisenstein’s books Film Form and The Film Sense are worth reading for the way they theorize his philosophy, with specific attention on the “methods of montage” – metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal and intellectual.
Check out our January selection of Eisenstein films – Ivan the Terrible, Part I, Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyar’s Plot, The General Line (Old and New) and October (Ten Days that Shook the World). And if you like those, you can also find his masterpieces Strike and Battleship Potemkin on ShotDeck.
CHRISTOPHER GUEST
In January, we curated four films from the King of the Mockumentary himself, Christopher Guest! The British-American director, actor, screenwriter and comedian has directed eight feature films and acted in dozens more, pioneering a brand of mockumentary comedy that has inspired countless other filmmakers and television creators. Guest is known for performing in many of the films he directs, but over the course of his career, he has also worked with many of the same actors repeatedly, forming something of a comedy troupe going from film to film together. Some of his most frequent collaborators include Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Jane Lynch and Jennifer Coolidge.
This month, we added A Mighty Wind, The Big Picture, Waiting for Guffman and For Your Consideration to our library – check them out, as well as Best in Show, on ShotDeck today!
It gets even bigger in February! Stay tuned for an extravaganza of Awards-season movies, curations celebrating Black History Month, a mega-drop of one of the most popular television series of the century, and a special treat for Valentine’s Day. Bring on 2025!
