THE TUESDAY DROP: 2400+ New Shots

07.12.22   Get your Decks ready ShotDeck Team! We’re adding all episodic content this week, including shots from the hit series Squid Game as well as more episodes from the first seasons of Stranger Things and Insecure. Check them out below, and remember you can always request films for future drops by clicking here!

SQUID GAME is a South Korean drama television series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk, starring Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo, Wi Ha-joon, HoYeon Jung, O Yeong-su, Heo Sung-tae, Anupam Tripathi and Kim Joo-ryoung. The series follows hundreds of cash-strapped contestants who accept an invitation to compete in children’s games for a tempting prize, without realizing how deadly the stakes are. Squid Game Season 1 aired on Netflix in 2021, becoming its most-watched show. Hwang worked on the show with South Korean production designer Chae Kyoung-sun, who had worked on his earlier project Silenced. 

Each of the games in Squid Game were designed from scratch by Chae and the art team, meaning they had to collaborate closely with Hwang to create a space that was both visually appealing and accurate to the way that the games within the show needed to be presented. Chae and Hwang were inspired by the mint and pink color schemes of Korean children’s books from the 70s and 80s for the overall palette of the show, and had clear goals for the look and feel of each game. “Red Light, Green Light” was inspired by the 80s textbook Chul-soo and Young-hee, juxtaposing its fairy tale imagery against the fear evoked by the vegetation. “Honeycomb” was designed with the idea that playgrounds seem so much bigger to children than adults, and playing with the scale of the set to recreate that sense of space, as well as fear. Both the dormitories and “Tug of War” were designed with the central concept of “people who are abandoned on the road”, and the physical space was extended with CGI. “Marbles” was designed to tell the story of the memories of one of the participants, with each piece of memory brought in as different sides of the alleys, creating a stage whose depth came from layering flat surfaces. “Glass Stepping Stones” was made deliberately large, set up high off the ground, in order to invoke fear in the contestants, and also to add to the physical challenge of navigating the space. 

STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 1 EP 6-8 (2016)

STRANGER THINGS is a science fiction drama television series created by Matt and Ross Duffer and distributed by Netflix. The first season stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Mille Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, and Matthew Modine. The season is set in 1980s Indiana and follows a group of young friends who begin unraveling a series of supernatural mysteries when they become witness to a series of strange events and secret government exploits. Stranger Things Season 1 was nominated for numerous Primetime Emmy Awards (including Outstanding Drama Series), winning for Outstanding Casting – Drama Series, Outstanding Sound Editing, Outstanding Main Title Design and Outstanding Original Main Title Music. Season 1’s production design was helmed by American production designer Chris Trujillo, who had previously worked on Honeymoon with Ross Duffer’s wife, director Leigh Janiak. 

Stranger Things was filmed in and around Atlanta, with the creative team wanting to create a sense of “Anytown, USA” in the look and feel of the show. Trujillo spent a huge amount of time going through garage sales and estate sales around the US in order to develop the show’s lived-in 80s look, developing a treasure trove of props that became the heart of the production design for the show. The Beyer house was built in order to accommodate the evolving story that took place in it, and Trujillo built a series of replacement walls in the house by printing the wallpaper pattern onto sheets of latex that were used as walls in places that had to then be taken down when elements of the Upside Down started the invade the space.

INSECURE: SEASON 1 EP 6-8 (2016)

INSECURE is a comedy-drama television series created by Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore, partially based on Rae’s web series Awkward Black Girl. The series aired on HBO from 2016 to 2021, and follows the lives of best friends Issa and Molly, as they navigate the tricky professional and personal terrain of modern life as black women in Los Angeles. Insecure stars Issa Rae, Yvonne Orji, Jay Ellis, Lisa Joyce, and Natasha Rothwell. Insecure Season 1 aired from October to November of 2016. Season 1’s cinematography was led by German cinematographer Anette Haellmigk, and whose work has included Game of Thrones. 

One of the most important progressions that the cinematography of Insecure showcased was the contemporary techniques it used to light the predominantly black and brown cast members of the show. Inspired by the techniques used by Ernest R. Dickerson in his cinematography work alongside Spike Lee, the camera and lighting team worked closely with the rest of the cast and crew to light actors in a way that did justice to them. Rather than relying on the reflective make-up that Dickerson often used, the team used reflective surfaces as their core lighting sources on the skin of the actors, as opposed to shining light directly on them, which would create hard shadows. The team often shone lights into white or canvas muslin which the skin then reflected, and also used low intensity LiteMats for a more direct source. The team also made extensive use of polarizers on the camera in order to shape light more effectively, and positioned lights in a three quarter position to make the effect on the actors as pleasing as possible.