What is (are) your favorite frame(s)?
What is (are) your favorite frame(s)? Part Deux
i’m sure you could google film stills and find plenty of sites, too
There are many websites with Film Stills – a google search should give you plenty.
Check out http://www.themoviedb.org
DVD comparison sites like DVDBeaver.com are also rich with film stills.
For stills from more obscure films try joining cinemageddon – It’s actually a torrent Forum but users always upload groovy caps from the films they share.
Toutlecine
Cinemasquid
& try Googling “[film title] screencaps”.
There are great LiveJournal communities devoted to film stills (e.g. film_stills.livejournal.com & cap_it.livejournal.com), but most you have to be a member of to browse. Film_stills has a rather large collection of obscure stuff.
EDIT: Actually, it appears you CAN see quite a few postings without being a member.
Cinemasquid is a nice one indeed!
I find the most interesting (interesting to me) shots are ones I have a hard time finding. So after I watch a movie, I load it up on my lappie and screen shot my favourites. Example: from Wendy and Lucy
Thanks for the compliment about the stills Joel! The other editors and I spend a lot of time trying to find the best stills for each film. There’s often quite a bit of discussion regarding the stills for more popular films as we try to find one that captures some essence of the film’s style, themes or characters, while simultaneously trying to provoke interest from people who haven’t seen the film before and renewing the interest from those who have. Our goal is to find stills that move away from the most familiar images that are used to represent the films over and over again, and bring a new iconic image to the fore. While we aren’t anywhere near done with this process, I’m pretty happy with the results so far. My personal hope is that we raise a question in people’s minds over the still and what it says about the film and that doing so will engage the viewer to think more about what the film is about.
Where we get the stills from varies. Ideally, we make the caps ourselves if one of the editors, or whoever submitted the film to the database, has a copy of the film, if that isn’t a possibility, we’ll often spend quite a bit of time looking for something that really hits us as standing out from the normal takes on the film from wherever we can dig it up. We often have several good images to choose from, so picking just one can be tough since they all tell a slightly different story about the film.
I could go on and on about individual stills and why they were chosen or the process choosing them, but that’s moving away from your question, so I’ll leave it there. Let it suffice to say there is no one we’ve used to find stills, but a variety of them. If you want to dig up some of your own from the web, the best thing to do is to simply search for by the title of the film in different languages and look at a lot of sites. There isn’t really one comprehensive site for good stills, but there are a lot of sites with specialized interests and tastes that cover most of the more well known films. For lesser known and older movies it can be a lot harder to dig anything really interesting up, especially if the film has never been released on DVD.
(And I have chosen the new Pulp Fiction still which everyone on this site seems to hate!) :D
^ Not me, Grey Daisies. I love that Pulp Fiction still. It’s perfect for the movie, striking and very iconic, no matter what other people say.
Joel
I am constantly in awe of some of the shots that are used to capture the essence of a film here on MUBI, I was just wondering if anyone knows of a good website or resource to get my hands on some beautiful film stills. Especially in the wake of so many dubbed ‘contemplative’ films. I need to spice up my desktop.