Seceda Studios

· Services

What we make.

We're Seceda Studios, a cinematic video production company based in Berlin. We make films, branded mini-documentaries, and episodic series for brands and filmmakers who need more than a 30-second ad can carry. We stay small on purpose. Our crews came out of engineering and film schools in equal measure, which is why we usually come in under what a traditional production house quotes for the same scope.

A frame from 'The Backdoor', a narrative short film produced by Seceda Studios.

01 · Film

Film Production

shorts, features, and spec work that land festival-ready.

We make narrative film for people who care about the craft. That covers short films, feature development, and commissioned-director work. We handle the shoot, edit, sound, colour, and festival strategy. You arrive with a script or an idea. We come back with a film that travels.

  • Narrative shorts (3–20 min)
  • Feature development and co-production
  • Commissioned-director features
  • Festival submission strategy
  • Full post pipeline: picture, sound, colour, VFX

Talk about a film

Still from Metabrew, a branded mini-documentary produced by Seceda Studios for YouTube.

02 · Mini-docs

Branded Mini-Documentaries & Mini-Doc Series

your brand's story, told by the people who lived it.

A five-minute documentary converts better than a thirty-second commercial, as long as it is actually a documentary. We find the real story your brand is sitting on, get the humans in front of camera, and cut the piece the way a flagship news magazine would if they were on your payroll. You can commission a single film, or a series of three to twelve episodes.

  • Single mini-doc (5–15 min)
  • Mini-doc series (3–12 episodes)
  • Founder and operator stories
  • Community and impact films
  • Product origin films
  • Event coverage cut as narrative doc
  • Multi-platform delivery for YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, and on-site embed

Scope a doc

Still from Dulens, emotional brand storytelling produced by Seceda Studios.

03 · Series

Branded Dramatic or Sketch Comedy Series

episodic stories with your brand inside, not plastered on top.

Product placement died the day audiences learned to skip ads. What replaced it is genre-aware episodic storytelling, where a brand is a character, a setting, or a stakeholder rather than a sponsor bug. We develop and produce short dramatic series and sketch comedy seasons that compound over time, live natively on YouTube and social, and build the kind of audience that eventually buys.

  • Scripted dramatic series (3–10 episodes)
  • Sketch comedy seasons
  • Vertical-native serial formats
  • Episodic arc planning and writers' room
  • Social cut-down strategy for each episode
  • External writer talent welcome

Develop a series

Frame from the Adidas spec campaign, cinematic commercial production by Seceda Studios.

04 · Cinematic

Cinematic Video Production

anything else that needs to look like it cost twice what it did.

Commercials, spec work, branded campaigns, founder films, recruiting films, investor decks, product reveals, music videos. If it needs to land with the cinematic weight of something shot on a Hollywood rig, we can scope it. A small core crew plus a deep Berlin freelancer network means the same team scales cleanly from a two-person Leica shoot to a three-camera ARRI rental.

  • Commercials, broadcast and social
  • Spec and sizzle work
  • Product reveal and launch films
  • Recruiting and employer-brand films
  • Founder and investor films
  • Music videos
  • Any bespoke cinematic brief

Describe the brief

· Process

How a project moves.

Four stages. One timeline. No mystery weeks.

  1. 01

    Brief

    You send a one-paragraph note. We send back questions, then either a realistic scope and price inside 48 hours, or an honest answer that we are not the right fit, plus a recommendation for who is.

  2. 02

    Concept

    Once we are moving forward, you get a creative treatment, a shot list, and a working budget. One round of revisions is included. We do not bill for rejected concepts.

  3. 03

    Production

    We shoot. You get daily rushes, same-day from a Berlin set and within 24 hours from anywhere else in Europe. No black-box weeks where the client has to wait and hope.

  4. 04

    Delivery

    Picture lock, colour, sound, final master, social cut-downs, whatever the contract covers. Your files live in your drive, not ours. We never gate the assets we made for you.

· Operators

Production, built like software.

Most production houses are creative shops that happen to run a business. We're a creative shop that runs like an engineering team, because we came from both worlds. We write and direct the work ourselves. We also build and maintain the open-source tools that the film, TV, and creator industries use to plan, staff, and ship their own projects.

What that buys you as a client: clear pipelines, no-surprise budgeting, and a turnaround that beats what traditional production companies quote for the same scope. Nothing here is artisanal in the vague sense. We ship.

· Technology

Open source, because the industry deserves better tools.

The film and creator industries still run on PDFs, spreadsheets, and email threads. We think that's fixable, and we're shipping the fixes in public. Every repo lives at github.com/secedastudios.

  • SlateHub

    networking for the people who actually make things.

    A free, open-source networking platform for filmmakers, actors, crew, and content creators. Semantic search over verified profiles, project collaboration, and an embedded job board. We use it on every Seceda production to discover and book crew. The rest of the industry gets it on the same terms.

    slatehub.com · github.com/secedastudios/SlateHub

  • Pavilion

    one upload, infinite screens.

    Open-source film distribution and white-label streaming. You own the player, the domain, and the viewer data. No platform rent, no gatekeeper between your film and your audience. Built in Rust on Axum, SurrealDB, and Datastar, so it's actually self-hostable on a modest box.

    github.com/secedastudios/pavilion

  • Aristotle

    script breakdowns, minus the three-day spreadsheet.

    Smart script breakdowns. Feed it a screenplay, get scene-by-scene cast, prop, set, and VFX lists that used to take a 2nd AD the better part of a week. A pre-production unlock for any indie schedule where time is the scarcest resource.

    github.com/secedastudios/aristotle

  • Mensch

    find the grant before you write the pitch.

    An AI-assisted research assistant for film financing. Ask about a project's shape and get back the regional grants, tax incentives, and co-production funds it could qualify for, without chewing through a week of manual EU film-institute spelunking.

    github.com/secedastudios/mensch

Plus the smaller crates we depend on internally, including osf-rust, a Rust parser for the Open Screenplay Format. If you're a studio, a school, or an agency and something we've built would make your life easier, help yourself. That's the deal.

· Q&A

What people usually ask.

Do you work outside Germany?

Yes. The core crew is in Berlin, but we've shot in Spain, the UK, the US, and on location across the EU. Travel is billed at cost. We never mark up flights or hotels.

What's a typical budget?

Mini-docs start around €8–12k. Commercials are €15–60k. Short films are €30k and up. Branded series run €80k and up per season. We quote exactly once we see the brief, so the ranges above are only for checking whether we're in the same ballpark.

Can we use the footage for paid ads?

Yes. Our standard contract transfers full rights for paid and organic use on all channels, in perpetuity. No per-platform royalties. No five-year clocks.

Do we need to bring a script?

No. We can write it for you, co-write it with you, or work from a script you already have. Writing is included in the quote either way.

How long does a project take from brief to delivery?

Mini-documentary: 4–6 weeks. Commercial: 3–5 weeks. Short film: 8–16 weeks depending on post complexity. Series timelines vary with episode count, but we lock the full delivery schedule before the first day of shooting.

Why does a production company run open-source software projects?

Because the tools we needed didn't exist, and building them turned out to be cheaper than buying bad ones. The tools make our own work faster. They also make the broader creator industry a little less painful for everyone else. Our public repos live at github.com/secedastudios.

Got a story?
get in touch.

Send a note with whatever you've got. You'll hear back within one business day, usually from chris@secedastudios.com.

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