Shot Zero - NEXT UP
What We're Looking at in 2026
It’s been over four years of Shot Zero now (!!!!), and we still hold the ethos we put out when our readership was mostly Stu’s mom:
We won’t paywall our content. We believe education should be free.
Especially film education — a form that has increasingly
become the province of the wealthy.
But we do offer a paid subscription in case you feel like supporting our work.
We’re trying a few new things in the coming year.
Mostly, more videos:
both the sort of intensive dives Stu puts forth on our YouTube channel
and short reels where Mel speaks analysis instead of writing it.
Shot Zero is a labor of love, beholden only to ourselves and our readers.
We showcase a wide range of films and television, every thing we watch ourselves.
This includes noir, reality TV, romcom, horror, silent, queer, indie, blockbuster, films of all languages, foreign films (which for the two of us means ‘not made in US or Australia’), short, feature, series: you name it, we have and will talk about it.
The more we build our library, the more we believe it becomes a useful resource . . .
especially as film materials for pleasure and learning rapidly become inaccessible and inundated with overly simplistic and increasingly GAI slop ‘summaries.’
(We don’t use AI or ChatGPT to write a single syllable. We do prolifically use ellipses, parenthesis, and em dashes, though; at least, Mel loves them.)
Sometimes we write hundreds or thousands of words about one shot.
Other times we catalogue why and how every single shot of timekeeping instruments in The Bear is important (which we intend to continue in Season 5).
As you can imagine, all that’s a lot for two people.
We’d love to get more reader submissions, whether you have a specific concept about a scene you want us to post, or whether you have a scene you simply want someone to wax rhapsodic over.
Any support — subscribing, snagging a paid subscription, sharing the good word, dropping a comment — is much appreciated, this and any year.
Looking forward to our fifth year with gratitude,
Stu and Mel
