Researching Creative
Researching a creative on a project could just be watching movies for inspiration, searching through image galleries to find reference photos, or posting on facebook to see if anyone has suggestions for a look you are going for.
Reference Libraries
Really helpful tool for finding reference images that match a certain look. Allows you to search using keywords and will bring a number of reference photos that match it, will also allow you to put those references into a PDF to present to the director.
The Film grab website can be very helpful if you know what movie you are looking for. Not searchable by keyword, so difficult to find things you don't mean to.
Another film grab website, similar to film-grab.com, but has more stills per film. Also not searchable by keyword.
Commercial oriented, has some keywords, but very limited.
Has a very cool search option where you can look for specific colors in frame.
Commercial stills with searchable tags.
Commercial and film stills with searchable tags
This can be helpful for finding animated gifs of something you wish to recreate or some type of movement.
Uses AI to help tag and create images.
Reference Wiki
This was a reference Library created by Ryan Thomas that is usable by anyone. This is no longer supported though as the pricing has made it not feasible. Searchable by keywords. Great to have a reference library with other people so you can all add to it. Very helpful to have something like this because once you spend a large amount of time looking for an image, or you see something you really like and want to reference later, you should be able to find it easily next time.
Facebook can be very helpful in a number of ways. One is finding facebook groups that are posting the kind of work that you like, an example is following a group that posts commercials. When you see one you like, you can click the 3 small dots, then click save video. You can save these videos into a collection. Can also do the same with film grabs, paintings, or anything else visual, then seperate them out into separate collections.
You can also use facebook to ask people if they have any references for a look you're trying to create. Some groups you can post in are
You can ask something like "Does anyone know of any movies that utilize different aspect ratios in a scene?" People will usually push you in the right direction if not just give you the answers right away. Can be really helpful.