Shot-for-shot (or shot-for-shot adaptation, shot-for-shot remake) is a way to describe a visual work based on an existing work that is transferred almost completely identically from the original work without much interpretation.
Production uses
In the film industry, most screenplays are adapted into a storyboard by the director or storyboard artists to visually represent the director's vision for each shot, so that the crew can understand what is being aimed for.
300: Director Zack Snyder photocopied the graphic novel and constructed the preceding and succeeding shots.
Watchmen: Zack Snyder again used the graphic novel as his main storyboard, featuring several shots that are almost identical to their literary counterparts.
The Marvel Super Heroes animated series used extremely limited animation produced by xerography, consisting of photocopied images taken directly from the comics and manipulated to minimize the need for animation production.
The Maxx: Sam Kieth and William Messner-Loebs' Image Comics series was adapted in an animated television series by Rough Draft Studios and MTV in 1995. According to Richard Mathes of TubeWad, the animated adaptation follows the comic book art almost line for line. The producers decided to use animation that was almost identical to the panels within the Image comics instead of the "cartoony" dark tone of the comics, and the animators animated as little as possible.
Many Japanese anime series that are based on a preceding manga series strive to adapt the story without many changes. One example of this is Monster, which besides adding animation, music and shuffling around some scenes, is a perfect recreation of the source material. If the anime and manga are being produced concurrently, however, and should the anime overtake the release of new source material, the producers might then be forced to create their own new ending to the story, go on hiatus, or create a "filler arc" with an original story arc that non-canonically continues the story until more material has been created.
Film to film
Some films are remade in an almost identical "frame-to-frame" fashion:
Amateur filmmakers Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and Jayson Lamb created a shot-for-shot adaptation of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark during their youth in the 1980s, titled Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. The film was unearthed and championed years later by filmmaker Eli Roth; a film about the boys' creation of the film was made in 2015.
John Erick Dowdle's 2008 film Quarantine is a remake of the Spanish film REC; like Funny Games, the remake is almost identical (except the musical score and some elements from the original have been omitted) and features an American crew and actors instead of the original Spanish.
Star Wars Uncut is an online fan-remake of Star Wars, which consist of close to 500 fifteen-second shot-for-shot segments created and submitted from a variety of participants. The sequel Empire Uncut was also released.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is a 2023 horror film remake by David Lee Fisher of the 1922 original. It technically preserves a shot-by-shot format by using green screen to insert colorized backgrounds from the original film atop live-action with different actors, including Doug Jones. It is a process similar to his 2005 version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which used a digital recreation of the original film's artificial backdrops with added dialogue scenes.
In the early days of sound film, it was common for Hollywood studios to produce foreign language versions of their films using the same sets and costumes but a different set of actors as the original. Although a different director would be brought in for the foreign-language version, they would have access to the daily footage from the English language production and would often use the same shots and camera setups. Often the result would be similar to a 'shot-to-shot' remake, although in some notable examples (such as Dracula (1931 Spanish-language film)), the alternate director exercised more creative freedom.
A genre of online collaboration projects, sometimes called "reanimated collabs", strives to create a shot-for-shot remake of an animated feature or television episode with many different animators handling different scenes. One example is Shrek Retold, a shot-for-shot remake of Shrek which was produced using 200 different creators and art styles.
Homage
Some directors pay tribute/homage to other works by including scenes that are identical:
To celebrate its 100th episode "Mercy", the showrunners of The Walking Dead created a shot-for-shot remake of the first scene broadcast of the series from the pilot "Days Gone Bye".
The Iranian TV series Haft Sang has been described as a shot-for-shot adaptation of Modern Family.
Many comedy works that rely heavily on parody use shot-for-shot as a substance of humor:
Many Simpsons episodes parody other works by using shot-for-shot representation, such as a scene in "I'm Spelling as Fast as I Can" taken from Requiem for a Dream.
The television show Family Guy commonly transitions into shot-for-shot remakes of famous scenes, sometimes depicting the original actors, at others inserting characters relevant to the current episode.
A fan-made webcomic parody of the manga Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, titled Bartkira, has been created by Ryan Humphrey and is currently ongoing, with the first three volumes adapted. It is a panel-for-panel retelling of the manga illustrated by numerous artists contributing several pages each, with Otomo's characters being portrayed by members of the cast of The Simpsons; for example, Kaneda is represented by Bart Simpson, Milhouse Van Houten replaces Tetsuo, and Kei and Colonel Shikishima are portrayed by Laura Powers and Principal Skinner respectively.