How do we choose the content on the site?
Each title’s shots are hand-selected by one of our image taggers. In picking which titles get broken down and tagged first, we go off a list of titles that we’ve been building for years. It’s currently got over 20,000 titles and is growing every day as we add new ones and users submit their suggestions.
We organize and prioritize these titles by a number of different criteria including visual style, place in cinema history, diversity of both subject and filmmaker, country of origin, the personal taste of our team, and of course the input of our users. We really do listen to user suggestions. Titles with a higher number of suggestions almost always get pushed to the front of the queue.
While we already have thousands of titles live on the site, we recognize that we have a LONG way to go before ShotDeck is where we want it to be and increasing the diversity of our library is an integral part of that push. Both the diversity of the stories being told, as well as the diversity of the filmmakers telling them. This will come in many forms: more filmmakers of color, more female filmmakers, more international films, more independent films, more art house films. We take this effort seriously and we appreciate your patience as we work every day to get closer to that goal.
We are unfortunately limited to those titles for which we are able to acquire a high definition source. There are certain titles that we badly want to host on ShotDeck but they are currently unavailable in anything better than standard definition. But we’re always working to open new avenues of access to the titles that our users want most, so things can change…
Ultimately we want ShotDeck to have all of your favorite films and series, award winners, and visually iconic titles, but also be a place of discovery for new, underappreciated, and previously unseen talent. So, please help us by suggesting titles and we will keep working to build ShotDeck into the essential library of the moving image.