Estate Plans Transfer Assets. We Help Transfer Values, Wisdom, and Family Identity.
Dickens Brothers creates permanent records of the founder’s voice, philosophy, and vision through film so future generations understand not just what was built, but why.
Our Story
We Were Inspired By Something That Changed Our Lives
It started for us in 2016 when we decided to make a documentary about our late father. He passed away from cancer when we were kids. We wanted to create something that not only honored him, but also brought together all the people who he impacted throughout his life.
A year later, we interviewed close to 40 people and developed an 80 minute film that brought our father’s story to life. We titled it, His Legacy.
A family’s identity isn’t held by one person. It’s held by the full circle, the founders and the family, but also the partners, the mentors, the rivals, the employees, and the lifelong friends. The people who saw the sacrifices, who were there for the failures, and who experienced the impact. We interview across generations and across relationships, drawing out the stories rarely told and the perspectives no one has heard. We then build it into a cinematic continuity film that becomes the family’s permanent reference point for who they are, where they came from, and what they stand for. Our process takes you on a collaborative experience to construct your legacy for future generations.
Our Story
We Started Because We Knew What Discontinuity Felt Like
Our father passed away from cancer when we were kids. There was no video of his voice. No footage of his stories. No record of the values that shaped him. In 2016, we set out to fix that, interviewing nearly 40 people to piece together an 80-minute film we titled His Legacy. That experience taught us something we’ve seen confirmed in every family since: the stories that hold a family together don’t survive on their own. They have to be deliberately captured and transmitted forward. That’s what Dickens Brothers does.
DOCUMENTARY CASE STUDY
A Dime to Give: The Holloway Story
WHAT WE DO
What a Continuity Film Captures
What We Preserve, Every engagement captures six dimensions that families need to
stay connected to who they are and where they came from.
Origin
How the wealth was built. The founding story, the obstacles overcome, the sacrifices made, the turning points that created everything the family has today. Without this documented, heirs inherit assets without understanding what they cost.
Values
The real principles that guided the founder’s decisions, how money was made, how people were treated, what lines were never crossed. Not a mission statement. The actual convictions. Without these transmitted, the next generation has wealth but no compass.
Intention
What the founder hopes the next generation will do with what they’ve received. Not just asset management, but responsibility, stewardship, and purpose. Without stated intention, heirs guess. And guessing leads to conflict.
Voice
The founder’s voice, preserved permanently. Not words on paper, the actual person: their conviction, their cadence, their presence. This is the one thing that cannot be reconstructed after they’re gone.
Connection
The filmmaking process itself becomes the family’s first shared experience in years. Stories surface that no one knew. Conversations happen that never would have. One Texas family saw their disengaged third and fourth generation voluntarily reengage with the family foundation by the end of the project.
Permanence
A cinematic documentary the family returns to at every major transition, succession conversations, foundation board meetings, next-generation onboarding, and hard family decisions. Not a one-time watch. A permanent tool.
AWARDS
WHO WE SERVE
Founders: Visionary Leaders and Pioneers
You built something from nothing. Your biggest concern isn’t the balance sheet, it’s whether the people who come after you will understand what it took and why it mattered. We create a permanent record of your voice, your philosophy, and the leadership lessons that shaped everything you built.
Families: Legacy and Tradition Bearers
The stories that hold your family together don’t survive on their own. Within two generations, the origin story, the sacrifices, the principles, they fade. We capture all of it in a format your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will actually experience and understand.
Foundations: Purpose-Driven Organizations
Your foundation has a mission statement. But does the next generation of board members understand the conviction behind it? We capture the founder’s passion, obstacles, and intent in a film that keeps the mission alive, long after the people who started it are gone.
Founder to Foundations
Every wealthy family has attorneys, advisors, and financial plans. Almost none of them have documented why the wealth exists in the first place, what the founder sacrificed, what principles guided them, and what they hope the next generation will understand. That’s the gap we fill. A continuity film isn’t just a tribute. It’s a form of infrastructure. It captures the founding generation’s origin, values, obstacles, impact and intentions in a format that keeps the family connected to its identity across every transition. Estate plans handle the money, while continuity films handle the meaning. One without the other is incomplete.
Past Films
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
About the work
A continuity film is a cinematic documentary that preserves a founder’s voice, values, history, and intentions for future generations. Unlike a tribute video or written memoir, it combines the founder’s own on camera storytelling with interviews across family members, partners, employees, and mentors, so the story survives in many voices and can be revisited at successions, board meetings, and family gatherings.
Videography documents an event. This is preservation work: months of preproduction, research, interview planning across generations, archival integration, and documentary post production. The deliverable is not footage of a moment. It is a film a family uses for decades.
The founder, spouse, children and grandchildren where relevant, and the people who saw the story from outside the family: business partners, longtime employees, mentors, friends, and sometimes rivals. Multiple perspectives are what separate a story from a testimony. Our film His Legacy runs 80 minutes and was built from nearly 40 interviews.
Yes. Foundations use continuity films to preserve the founder’s mission and conviction through executive transitions, board leadership changes, milestone anniversaries, capital campaigns, and sunsetting, so the original intent remains something new leaders and donors can experience rather than infer.
Cost and process
Engagements at Dickens Brothers begin around $25,000 for a founder only film and range past $250,000 for projects spanning generations one through four plus colleagues and partners. Families often begin with a Continuity Diagnostic, a facilitated 90 minute session, for $300.
Most engagements run several months from first conversation to finished film, depending on the number of generations and interview subjects. The process spans preproduction with research and interview architecture, production with filmed interviews, and post production with editing, archival integration, and finishing.
Estate plans transfer assets. They do not transfer the reasons the assets exist. Research on wealth transfer shows roughly 70 percent of estate transitions fail, overwhelmingly due to breakdowns in trust and communication rather than legal or financial error. A continuity film addresses the side of the transfer the documents cannot: the story, values, and intent.
Timing and circumstance
Earlier than most families think. Common trigger moments include the start of estate or succession planning, the sale of the family business, a health scare, a milestone birthday, a company anniversary, or the recognition that the founder’s stories exist nowhere outside the founder. The only wrong time is after.
It is one of the best possible times. During a sale, identity, legacy, and often grief converge, and the people who lived the story are still gathered in one place. Once the wire clears, teams disperse and the institutional memory scatters within months. Capturing the story during or immediately after a transaction preserves it while every voice is still reachable.
Yes, and this is the moment many families finally call. We adapt the process to the person’s energy: shorter sessions, filming at home, and prioritizing the questions only they can answer. Families in this situation should reach out sooner rather than later, since the most valuable sessions are the ones that feel almost too early.
The story can still be preserved through the people who lived it alongside them. Our founding project, His Legacy, was built after our own father’s passing from nearly 40 interviews with the people who knew him, woven together with archival material. A posthumous film cannot recover the founder’s own telling, which is why we urge families not to wait, but it can preserve the story itself while the witnesses remain.
Handled carefully, returning to a shared origin is often a step toward repair. The interview process gives each person their own room, their own telling, and equal dignity in the final film, and families frequently discover their accounts agree on more than they assumed. We are documentarians rather than mediators, and for families in active dispute we often work alongside the family’s advisors or a family dynamics professional.
