Seeper x Culture House Sunderland

The most interesting decision on this project was made before a frame was shot. Seeper did not want to be named in their own case study.

No voiceover explaining the brief, no member of the Seeper team on camera walking through the technical achievement. The brand that commissioned the film stays almost entirely out of it.

That is an unusual thing for a studio to ask for, and it was absolutely the right call. A film about a civic building that leads with the agency behind it immediately becomes an advert. Awards juries can smell that from the first ten seconds, and so can the councils and cultural institutions who might commission Seeper next. The work was good enough that pointing at it would have made it smaller.

So we built the film around the people who were going to use the building instead. Four voices from Sunderland, none of them from Seeper: the director of Culture House and three well-known local figures from the city’s music and sporting life. They talk about what the place means to the city rather than how it was made. The technology is everywhere on screen and never mentioned once. The atrium, the Immersion Gallery, the wayfinding, the content platform: all of it is doing visible work in every shot, and the audience simply experiences it the way a visitor would, as atmosphere rather than specification.

The result is a case study where the impact speaks louder than the credit. Anyone in the industry watching it understands exactly what was built and who could have built it. Everyone else just watches a film about a city getting something it waited a long time for.

Culture House handed over to Sunderland City Council on 1 August 2026. Until that date Seeper were still keyholders with full access. After it, every decision would go through the council.

That gave us a fixed window. We shot on 28 and 29 July, two days, on a building that was still a live site with the delivery team working around us and the public opening still six weeks away.

The original schedule ran to thirteen hours a day. We brought it back to a 10+1 structure, ten working hours plus a break, and reshuffled the running order to protect the atrium, which carried eighteen must-get shots on its own across four different content states. We also agreed a priority list in advance, so that when a space became unavailable or the delivery team needed the floor, we sacrificed from the wish list rather than from the film.

Two people, four cameras, sixty one shots across sixteen locations.

Working with a two person crew and four camera bodies let us move faster than the shot list suggested was possible. While one camera was on a gimbal mid tracking shot, another was already built on a slider or tripod for the next setup. On a list this dense, that saved hours across the two days.

We shot almost entirely on available natural and house light, carrying two portable lights for close ups on subjects and controlled interview setups. The building’s own lighting design was too good to fight.

The hardest technical problem was the atrium. Seeper’s LED canvas runs four distinct content states, sea, nature, glass and architecture, plus transitions, and every hero shot needed capturing against each one. Tracking reveals, low angle orbits, balcony shots from the first and second floor, bench shots from behind. That single space accounted for roughly a third of the shoot.

Day two split the crew. One of us stayed on interviews at Culture House while the other covered solo B-roll across Sunderland, taking in exteriors, the Beacon of Light, the Stadium of Light and the Peacock pub.

The four contributors were chosen to carry the city rather than the building. Leanne Littlewood from Sunderland City Council, who commissioned the work. Barry Hyde, lead singer of the Futureheads and owner of the Peacock pub. Ross Millard, also of the Futureheads, and creator of Timepiece, the atrium’s archive-driven clock. And Alyson Dixon, Team GB marathon runner, now at the Sunderland AFC Foundation of Light.

One technical note worth recording. The original plan had Alyson interviewed in the City Eye space on the third floor with the Stadium of Light visible through the window behind her. With two portable lights there was no way to balance interior exposure against that much daylight without either silhouetting her or blowing the window to white. We moved her to a controllable space and made the Stadium connection in the edit instead, cutting her voice over footage of the ground. A stronger link than a bright window behind her head.

Rather than us picking the story in isolation, we delivered full stringouts and transcripts of every interview. Seeper’s team selected the soundbites they wanted and grouped them into two threads: the work itself, and the city around it. We built the narrative structure from there. The first assembly ran fifteen minutes. We brought it to four, then to two.

The biggest creative decision in post was how to start.

A film like this can open on a curiosity hook, withholding the reveal to build intrigue, or it can orient the viewer immediately with place and scale. We tested the first approach and talked it through with Seeper.

For this audience, cold viewers on LinkedIn or in a pitch room with no knowledge of Sunderland, orientation won. People need to know what they are looking at before they can be impressed by it.

So we built the opening outside in. The city first, then the exterior, then progressively deeper inside, with the widest atrium shot pulled forward as the reveal. The voices stayed exactly where they were. The orientation was solved entirely through the visuals, which cost nothing in runtime on a film that had none to spare.

The hero film runs to two minutes under the title “The House as a Home”. It is interview led with no voiceover, cut to a single music track, and delivered in 16:9 with the title treatment built in.

Alongside it we built four social cutdowns, each constructed as a standalone piece rather than a trimmed version of the hero. The first is near wordless, letting the atrium, Immersion Gallery, wayfinding and multimedia bookcases carry thirty to forty five seconds on the visuals alone. The second runs to a minute on the client’s voice only, from her vision for the building through to the moment her six year old nephew tested the Immersion Gallery. The third intercuts Barry, Ross and Alyson around memory, heritage and pride across seventy five seconds, with no client voice at all. The fourth is a mixed voice piece on who uses the building and how it feels to be in it.

All five films were delivered in 16:9, 9:16 and 4:5 with burnt in captions.

Culture House opened to the public in September 2026 and featured on BBC One’s The One Show.

The film now sits across Seeper’s website, their social channels, their new business decks and their awards entries, and was showcased at IAAPA London in September.