Hi, I’m Dawn: filmmaker, cinematographer, and the person responsible for publishing every single image you see on the site.
I started FilmGrab in 2010 to make it quicker and easier to find reference images. I graduated college into a recession, and my eagerness to work meant I worked on a lot of very low to no budget films, directing or DPing. I spent so much time looking through my thousands of DVDs to find a specific shot to bring pre-production meetings that eventually I thought ‘if I find these stills helpful, other people would too’.
Fifteen years later, my formerly personal archive is now the default reference library with nearly 4,000 films, 186 million views, and 11 million visitors to date, still run entirely by me. Every image here is hand-picked, catalogued, and uploaded by one person. I refuse to use AI or bots, even for the boring parts like site design, maintenance, and marketing. That’s all me, baby!
I’ve worked behind the camera for 15+ years as a cinematographer, videographer, and director of photography on shorts, series, and independent films like Nostalgia.exe and Mirrorman. I’ve also produced, directed, and edited hundreds of videos.
What FilmGrab is (and isn’t):
✅A personal archive that got out of hand.
✅A free, carefully curated reference library for filmmakers, designers, students, and anyone who’s ever had a stitch from how much a film hurt them (looking at you, Before Midnight).
✅A love letter to lighting, composition, and the craft of visual storytelling.
❌A commercial stock image site.
❌Scraped.
❌A content farm.
❌AI anything.
❌A “team of passionate creatives” (it’s literally just me).
Work With Me
If you’re a filmmaker or creative looking to shape the visual identity of your project, I also offer consultancy work — bringing the same obsessive care that goes into this archive to your ideas. Find out more here.
The images are presented under fair use, for education and reference purposes only. I don’t sell anything on the site, as I know I don’t own the imagery.