A private documentary about your family and the business it built.
Crest & Keeper makes legacy films for the families behind long-standing businesses. Each one is made like a real documentary, from filmed interviews, your own archive and the places where it all happened.
The history that lives in a few people's heads
Every long-standing family business has a history that was never written down. How it started. The year it nearly ended. Who held it together, and what it cost them. Those accounts live with a handful of people, and they go when those people go.
A Crest & Keeper film records them in the voices of the people who were there, then shapes them into a documentary of 20 to 30 minutes that the family keeps and hands on.
This is not marketing work. There is no script and no message to stay on. The film is made for the family first.
What goes into a film
- Filmed interviews
- Up to five people, filmed where they are at ease by a director who travels to you. Founders, their children, a spouse, the employee who has been there forty years.
- Your archive
- Photographs, letters, ledgers, old advertisements, home movies. Whatever the family has kept becomes part of the film.
- The places
- The shop floor, the first building, the kitchen table where the decisions were made. Up to three days of filming in your own spaces.
- The edit
- Shaped, scored and finished as a film. You see a first cut and give two rounds of notes before it is locked.
- What you keep
- A finished documentary of 20 to 30 minutes, delivered privately to the family. Longer films are made on request.
How a film is made
- I
A first conversation
Fifteen minutes by phone. We ask a few questions and mostly listen.
- II
A longer meeting
You meet the director, ask whatever you like, and we talk through whose voices belong in the film.
- III
Story and planning
We gather the archive with you, agree who will be interviewed and set the filming dates.
- IV
Filming
Up to three days, in your spaces and at your pace.
- V
The edit
A first cut, your notes, a second pass, then the finished film. A film takes two to five months from the planning call.
Private by default
The film belongs to your family. We do not publish it, screen it or describe it to anyone without your written permission, and nothing is posted online.
If you later want a shorter version for an anniversary, a company gathering or your own website, we can make one. That decision is always yours.
Who commissions a film
Families who have kept a business going for two generations or more. The reason is usually an anniversary, a handover to the next generation, or the wish to record a founder while they are here to tell it themselves.
Families with a story and no company behind it are welcome too.
Start with a conversation
We take a limited number of commissions each year, so that each film gets the time it needs.
If you would like to talk about a film for your family, write to us. The first conversation is fifteen minutes, with no presentation and no obligation.
Request a conversationOr write to studio@crestandkeeper.com