Pirates · National Maritime Museum Cornwall · Behind the scenes

Filming ‘Pirates’ at National Maritime Museum Cornwall

Words byRich StephensCo-founder and filmmaker at PixelRain

31 March 20233 min readUpdated 26 June 2026

A behind-the-scenes look at the atmospheric social teaser we filmed for the Pirates exhibition at National Maritime Museum Cornwall.

Section 01

The film

We’ve worked with the National Maritime Museum Cornwall on a good few exhibition launches over the years, and each one brings something different. Pirates lent itself to the camera beautifully: dark, atmospheric and full of visual interest.

The museum asked us to create a short social teaser ahead of the opening. Something to build curiosity without revealing too much. It sounds straightforward, but exhibition content has a particular tension to it: you want to draw people in, give them enough to get excited, but leave the best of it for when they actually walk through the door.

The Pirates exhibition itself is more layered than the name suggests. Yes, there are the swashbuckling characters most people picture, the mythology, the romance of the high seas. But the exhibition also pulls that apart, looking honestly at what life as a pirate actually involved. It’s darker and more nuanced than the popular image, and that contrast gave us something interesting to work with visually. One of the more unexpected elements was the Sea of Thieves crossover. The video game sits alongside the historical content, which creates this strange and genuinely engaging collision of centuries.

A first look at Pirates before the exhibition opened to the public.

Section 02

Getting the balance right

We shot it as an early preview, which gave us the best of both worlds. A small group of people moving through the space, reacting to it genuinely, but controlled enough that we could still show the exhibition properly. It gave the teaser some life and warmth without turning into crowd footage. There’s a version of this kind of content that feels sterile when it’s completely empty, and another that gets lost when it’s too busy. Getting that balance right matters.

NMMC are one of those clients where the relationship has deepened over time. They know what they want, they trust us to find the right way to say it, and they give us the space to do that. That makes for better work. We’ve helped them launch a number of exhibitions now and we’re still working with them today.