241: Preserving Legacies Through Storytelling
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What if your family’s greatest stories could live on like a Netflix documentary? In this episode of The Richer Geek, today we are joined by filmmaker and storyteller Chance McClain, founder of Heritage Films. With over 800 documentaries produced, Chance has made it his mission to capture family histories, founders’ journeys, and life legacies in cinematic style. From Army veteran to Broadway musicals to award-nominated filmmaking, Chance shares how storytelling preserves values across generations and why every story, big or small, matters.
In this episode, we chat about…
How Chance transitioned from Army service and radio to founding Heritage Films.
The story behind the very first Heritage Film and how it sparked a movement in legacy storytelling.
Why businesses and family farms are “characters” in founder films.
Surprising, real-life stories captured on film from WWII heroes to architects with secret pasts.
The evolution of filmmaking technology, from VHS tapes to drones and iPhones.
The emotional impact of preserving legacies and how families actually use and rewatch these films.
Why talking to older generations unlocks wisdom, humor, and life lessons we often overlook.
Key Takeaways:
Everyone has a story worth telling: whether you’re a founder, veteran, or grandparent, your life holds lessons for future generations.
Technology makes legacy preservation possible: from high-end Sony cameras to simple iPhones, storytelling tools are more accessible than ever.
Hard work, grit, and values outlast success stories: the true legacy isn’t just the narrative, it’s the wisdom passed down.
Stories change how we see people we thought we knew: a “regular” grandparent may have lived an extraordinary life.
Businesses and land carry their own legacies: a company or farm often becomes a living character in family films.
Connection matters more than production: while high-quality films are stunning, the heart lies in authentic conversations and memories preserved.
Resources from Chance
LinkedIn | Heritage Films | farmandranchfilms.com
Resources from Mike and Nichole
+ Read the transcript
Mike: Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Today we have Chance McClain. Very interesting podcast today. He's a master storyteller, visionary behind Heritage Films. He has 800 cinematic documentaries crafted. He captures the spirit of families and founders in a way that inspires and preserves. I wish I'd have known this guy back, you know, when my grandfather was still alive. Just to capture his stories. He's lived a life as diverse as projects. He's an army veteran. Thank you for your service. And he's done Broadway musicals to radio waves and film reels. Chance's passion for connection and storytelling makes him the ultimate guest. That's why he's on and he's going to talk to us about preserving legacies. How are you doing Chance?
Chance: Good, man. Boy, you sure to make me sound important?
Mike: You know what? I think you are. People like you that do what you do. I think it's extremely important because kids nowadays, number one, you know, they don't know history anymore and don't care. Don't even think about what their grandfathers did? What did these important people do in their lives? Building that legacy is extremely important. So tell us Chance, a little bit, how did you get involved doing this type of filmmaking?
Chance: Yeah. So after failing out of a couple colleges, I met a girl and decided to join the army. Four years of that was a lot of fun and peace time, I had a bunch of sales jobs and found myself working in radio. And I was a creative director of a sports radio station here in my hometown in Houston, within a couple years I was program director of a station we started. You gotta keep in mind, this is like the mid-2000s, whenever kind of the convergence of all tech was happening and here we were in this marconi's ancient invention of radio but I felt like we needed my jocks, my guys, we need to all be able to do radio, do video, do blogs, do podcasts, use social media. That's when all that stuff was getting popular and I leaned heavily into the video side of that and then in 2011, left radio to do video full-time. TV commercials. Pretty much anybody whose check would clear I'd put it on a screen. Then about a decade ago, a buddy of mine from not from the sports radio world, Michael Berry, he's a talk show host. He asked me to film his dad. His dad was turning 75, and he's like, "Dude, I want to know, I want my kids to know about their PaPaw. They're too stupid to ask right now, but one day when he's gone, they're gonna really want to know about their PaPaw's life and that's the first heritage film. And now we've done a whole crap load of them.
Mike: You know, back when we were young, you had the VH films, and those things were worn out and fairly audible and you know, as far as the video. So what you do, I think is extremely important especially if you enjoy your heritage and there's something to talk about.
Chance: Yes, sir. Yes sir. You nailed it. What you were just saying, you know, given the nature of your show the tech finally caught up with stuff that we always wanted, right? And you can look back, we show up with families in the 80s. We get a buttload of these VHS tapes that they set up that big old camera and they talk to their PaPaw that was born at the turn of the century and pepper him with questions and now it looks like crap, but at least they got it. And if you go back 10 years before that, we find a lot of families that remember the RadioShack tape recorder? Well, they would do these audio recordings of grandma talking about whatever. Now, we're doing the same thing. The technology has it so that we can do that but it looks like Netflix. They're very professional, they're awesome but at the root of it is a long conversation that I have with the loved ones and then professional editing and all that stuff. Basically, anybody could do this and I encourage everybody to do it. Get your iPhone out, do it yourself, at the end of the day, you'll want this, you know? But if you want to, if you want it white glove and awesome, then call me.
Mike: For all the founders that are out there listening, you guys started your tech companies or other types of companies. I think it's important to put down in video and words the founders of the companies also so it's not just families, right?
Chance: Absolutely right. Again, all the different areas that we've branched into. It used to be just, I go film Dad or Mom or Mom and Dad. And then after you've the volume of productions that we're doing, we noticed that a lot of these dads started companies in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, whenever it was and the business owner, the business founder, it's kind of a different thing that business, they started, particularly if it turned into a multi-generational. Dude, it's a character in their film. They don't talk about it like when I went to work. They talk about it similarly to how they talk about their freaking 40-year-old twins. Like it is their baby dude. So we kind of charted a path for people that felt like that was very important. Same thing with farm and ranch. We now have a division that's farm and ranch films because the land itself, it's kind of like a founder film but generally we're further on into the generations when we're filming the people but where the land is a character in the movie lots of fantastic stories out there, discover new ones every week.
Mike: It's absolutely fascinating. So give us kind of a behind-the-scenes look and some storytelling if you can, of some fascinating things that you've done.
Chance: Oh my goodness. It's like, pick a region. Pick a region and then I share a story from there. We did a film for this gentleman who's like a 70-something year old guy. This is up, up in the shadow of Mount Hood up in Oregon, and he's an architect and I'm like, "Cool, we're gonna film this architect." Well, when he gets into the stories, it turns out in 1968, he was like a 20-year-old kid at Berkeley and started getting into the whole 1968 Berkeley scene, but not so much as a participant in the scene but more on the business rewards entrepreneurial, founder side of the drug scene. And next thing you know, he is basically a drug runner. And I don't mean for a summer, I mean into the late 70's and that little chapter of his life ended with him turning state evidence against bigger drug people. And yet he got out of it. It was all good. It was a chapter of his life and he goes on and on and on, and now he's got kids and now he's got grandkids and it starts an architectural firm. And he's just some Grandpa down the road now but behind that Grandpa is this dude with an insane, like out of Miami Vice background. For real. I'm talking about speedboats and airplanes.
Mike: Wow. You never know and you know some of the guys that I hang out with, I do a lot of charity work and it's some of the Medal of Honor recipients. You know, it's like, "Oh my goodness," you know, I know there's some official History Channel- type stuff like that, but I could, some of these people, they're just, "What's up Grandpa?" You know?
Chance: Oh, I hope.
Mike: And you sit down, you're like " Wow. You're the badass before Rambo was the badass."
Chance: I got a story for you, man. Oh God. Okay, make me not say that again, but you know what I mean. So, last year we were watching the RNC on TV and they started talking about this World War II vet that's gonna come out and give a speech and out comes this old man and gets up there at the microphone and I'm like, "Holy crap! It's Bill Pekrul." A year before we were in Wisconsin filming his film for his family and I'm like texting the crew, texting my buddies, "It's Mr. Pekrul, he's on TV right now." And that guy, he's like this little 5'4 guy. He was second wave Normandy, but literally followed the path of a band of brothers. Everywhere they went, he went right behind them and there were stories that he shared that were harrowing about laying in a pile of bodies pretending to be dead while the Germans were bayoneting people, like, what the hell? Not just a little Grandpa, a total badass.
Mike: Absolutely. You know, it's just amazing and these things need to be preserved because I'm afraid that generation after generation, I had someone come up to me and say, "Happy Memorial Day." I'm like, "Eh." "Isn't this your day?" And I'm like, "Well, no, I'm, I'm still here."
Chance: I'm alive.
Mike: Right. I'm a Veteran's Day guy, but my grandfather, the people that we lost and you'd be nice to it you know or you know, why did we celebrate the 4th of July? They just don't know these things anymore.
Chance: No.
Mike: So it's important to somehow document whether or not they watch it or not or I don't know, but...
Chance: They absolutely do and when I started the company I thought this is gonna be for posterity. They're gonna put it on a DVD. We were doing DVDs back then. To your younger audience, these are these round silver things that play movies. I thought they would just be tucked away in a safety deposit box. And then when Papaw dies. Let's watch PaPaw's life and that just hasn't been the use case. They have a blast. And I think it's the younger the person, the more they like it. And I think it's because it literally, it looks like HBO documentaries. It's the same equipment, it's the same process, the same quality control and so there's a familiarity to quality documentary films except for it's your Grandma, or it's your Dad and it's him. And so now the families watch them at Christmas and family gatherings, it's just on in the background. You've probably heard of your work in the entrepreneurial space, there's the company you plan, the one you build and the one that actually exists. Those are three different companies. That's the same thing with the products that we were making. I thought they were gonna be this, they turned into this and then here's how they're really used. They're really watched. They wear 'em out.
Mike: Ladies and gentlemen he's done over 800 of these types of documentaries. What are some of the personal things, professional things, some of the things that you've learned that you could take away? Just sitting there like, "Wow, I never thought about this," or, "You know what? Based on what he just said, I might change my business." That learning and mentorship is kind of secondary while you are filming.
Chance: Sure. The values of the generations before us are inarguably better. I'm talking about work ethic, grit, things like that. And having talked to hundreds of people that have been through the grind and are now on the other side of it, when they reflect on it turns out that there are no shortcuts. It really does take pushing yourself and doing hard things. And I had a guy that I did his film with and he turned into a mentor and he literally had this line where he said something went with his wife. He had to get up at three in the morning instead of five for like a year 'cause he was a farmer. And I said, "Man, Jacko, that must have been hard." And he looks up and he is like "What is hard gotta do with anything?" And he wasn't saying that as like a punchline in an 80s action movie. He literally was wondering why Mr. Suburb Boy was worried about something being hard because on the farm, hard is just a word. That's in the way of getting some stuff done. He had similar thoughts about being busy. "Don't tell me you're busy, you're just complaining to me. Don't tell me you're busy." "Oh, you own your own company and you're busy? You should be grateful to God and tired. Nobody wants to hear you're tired. And you take those three things and hand it out to anybody that's running their own shop. Don't share that things are hard. Don't share that you're busy and don't share that you're tired." Now, there are people in your life where it's appropriate to share that and that would be the person you married, you know? Maybe your Mom and Dad if you've got that type of relationship where they're helping you through stuff still. But the rest of the world doesn't want to hear that. That's a little small one that I think matters.
Mike: We talked about Oregon a little bit. Was there someone you're like going, you can't believe that these people do what they did, or is there some other? Give me another story because I mean, we could talk about stories probably for the entire podcast. So I'm curious, give us another story of just something that stood out.
Chance: Yeah, I'm still stuck on the military thing probably because you look like you can still serve. You know very often on our forms, we have a line that says, "Please do not discuss." And because I need to know any landmines to stay away from and as you can imagine, people in their upper 70s, the Vietnam era, will very often write Vietnam. People a little older than that might write Korean. And the 27 World War II films I wrote, uh, would often write World War II. Over the years of doing this, I've had several guys, I can't even count how many who, when we get to that point in their story and I say, "Alright, then you go off, you know you're overseas for a while, but you get back and you got this girl waiting for you," and they say, " Chance, I want to tell you why I don't like talking about Vietnam." And I'm like, "Yes, sir." And then they tell me stuff from the movies. They tell me these horror stories of what happened, and they're crying and we're crying and we get through it. Then at the end of it, I can share some of these stories with you if you'd like. And then I'm gonna tell you one other military one that blows me away. I say, "Mr. So-and-So, you asked not to discuss what you just discussed, and I want to honor your request and not put it in the movie, but thank you for sharing." And they always say, "You know, it's time. It's time that my family knows about this." It's pretty powerful. One such guy was a Korean War vet who told me he didn't write it down. He was happy to talk about his exploits in Korea, and he talked about going into this cave and it was full of people and lots of, lots of really bad things happened. And he says, his gun jammed and mine didn't. And so that right there, that sword, that was his sword and it was a sword over his fireplace. Like, holy crap, I've been sitting here with that thing. The other one that I'll share with you very briefly, since you're a Navy man. Guy on his form says military service. He just put yes. I won't bore you with the details, but he was on UDT Team 2. Class 2. He was 100 years old when I filmed him seven or eight years ago. He was an original frogman. And I'm like, "What?" Now picture me in this seat talking to this old man. I'm like, "You are a stud!" And then I'm like, "God, you're what we all aspire to be." He's like, "Hold on. Let me tell you about why I am a frog man." And he didn't want to go to war and one of the ways to get out of going to fight was keep taking classes, keep taking classes. And he is like, "And I saw this one for underwater demolition." I'm like, "What are we gonna underwater demolish?" That'll be fun. Sign up for it. Make it all the way through. Anyway, he ended up having a very storied military career, but it all got started with him wanting to avoid conflict.
Mike: That's absolutely fascinating. So let's get into some of the technical stuff. When you started out, you know, how has tech evolved in your industry? I remember slapping in the VHS tape, you know, on the 10 lbs., 20 lbs. camera, whatever it was. So what are you guys doing now?
Chance: Yeah, well, we're on our 3rd, so 10 years in, and we're on our 3rd evolution of our gear set. If you think about a different business, that's a lot to replace all your cameras, you know? Your lights. When we first started, we had the hot lights. If you've been on a movie set, you know those big, bright hot that eat up, we'd plug 'em into somebody's trailer and it'd blow the fuses. It's a mess. So we've graduated to LEDs and different iterations of those. The cameras themself have gotten better and smaller. We use Sony cameras now that are fantastic, but just like when we started the lens is what matters the most. We have really good lenses, so they look beautiful, but our goal for having good tech isn't because we're, well, there's a term of art that's inappropriate. We're not just slavishly addicted to getting new gear. We want to get the best stuff that makes the best film to future proof it. I want the people to not even think about the gear that's in there, but behind-the-scenes it's really, really quality stuff. We have all these very nice Sony cameras with lenses and beautiful lights. We use our iPhones a lot. The iPhones, you could put under water. I'm thinking about a story of a guy that had this sick koi pond and we wanted to film the koi Well, you just take your iPhone and film it and go underwater. Put it right on the surface. We were able to get beautiful footage. Lots of times the iPhone ends up being good. And of course, all the different action cams on our farm and ranch films that we do. We may end up on somebody's ranch and riding, you know, a 90-year-old dude or a 70-year-old dude who's running his fence line on his ranger but we'll mount the GoPros and all the different type of fancy things, but at the end of it, I want him talking and this is what he does. So that's a good way to do it. So all the action cameras are part of it. Of course, the drone tech, there's drones that we're using for this, that, and everything. Most often it's a very simple thing. Let's just show the house in a really neat way, and the drone does that well. The root of it though, it's a long form conversation. Make 'em forget that any of that crap is there and just talk to me, man.
Mike: How many people are usually on set when you do, let's say basic interview, 77-year-old, you're in their house. How crowded is it?
Chance: Yeah. Like on, on exactly what you said. Some 77-year-old lady was filming her life story, in a day. It would be me and one person, and when we started, we were bringing out four and five people because I wanted to Hollywood it up. But as the volume of films increased and we learned our jobs better, we learned that it's intimidating. These people have never been around all this crap. Somebody sitting there. People behind each camera. There were too many people in the room. You lose some level of intimacy. So now we have it set up using some tech that, it's just me and the people in the room while the one crew guy is in the back scanning in pictures and filming the outside and things like that up to our larger, we have signature films that could be weeks, it could be multiple days, multiple parties in multiple states. Those the crews will grow up to never more than four or five people on any given location. Though there's a law of diminishing return that I think Hollywood misses.
Mike: Exactly. You could always revert back to, you know, the old Blair Witch type of a thing where it's like going, "Hey, here's a couple cell phones and, you know, no crew."
Chance: Yeah, exactly.
Mike: And do it. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Chance McClain, Heritage Films. Your website, you know, people are like going, "Yeah, I'm thinking about this. I want to do it, or I wanna learn more." Where do they go?
Chance: Go to yourheritagefilm.com. Y-O-U-R for all you people in East Texas that wanna try to put an apostrophe in it, yourheritagefilm.com. Fill out a form, say hello, and I will encourage people, even if they're not sure or the money timing isn't right. I will pass on things to help you. You need to do this. I'm telling you, we don't talk about kind of the McCobb side of you doing this so that when they're gone you have it and future generations have it. Now, the person I'm filming, they always end up getting that. They understand because they wish they had this up there, Grandma right? They get it. But when you're the son or the daughter that's wanting to do this with Mom and Dad or you don't talk about it. They know it too, but you don't really talk about it. At the end of the day, I thought that people wanted the stories and wanted the anecdotes and wanted the lessons, but if I've learned one thing from all this, we touched on it earlier. They want the values. They want the values that their parents or grandparents had. That maybe they got some of 'em, but at the end of the day, they're like, "Man, I got so busy in life and I screwed up a bunch of that stuff but my kids and their kids, there's something great about that generation, those generations before." That's really what they want to pass along and they think and hope that a film is gonna be a good way to do it and I agree with 'em.
Mike: It's funny, I look back at some of the old films and I'm like, "Oh, that's where I get that from."
Chance: Oh, yeah. We call them echoes like inside speech. It's when you're talking to somebody, imagine you're talking to an 80-year-old man who was a boy talking about his 80-year-old Grandpa. So now you just jumped, you know, 160 years and he's saying something about his Grandpa that I know. He's just like his grandson. So now you're jumping more years and like there was an echo, you know? Yeah. My great-Grandpa played the violin, or played the fiddle in Tennessee. He was played the little fiddle band, blah, blah. He talks about music and then no music comes up again until I get to the grandkids and he is like, well, yeah. And Connor, my oldest grandson, he's a pianist wherever and there's that music that came back and you see it, it's beautiful.
Mike: Yeah. Fascinating. So Chance, before we leave, is there anything, we just go on and on and on with stories. Is there anything that I missed that, you know, you'd like to tell our audience about Heritage Films you know, the importance, some type of a personal attribute? How important is this or something that I missed?
Chance: I sure can. And I'll even step outside of my own universe and just talk about the 70+ crowd, 70, 80, 90. The people that are, the old people, you know who they are. I used to be afraid to talk to 'em. I really was when I started the company. It's not that I was afraid, I just had no interest. I was like, there was a different sense of humor, different jam, different vibe. They do their thing. I do mine. And now I've learned that is just so shallow of me. They're fascinating. They have more history. They've been around the sun more times and things happen. The more times you go around the sun, you learn things, you observe things, you experience things. You see larger cycles in life and just walk up to them. I've made it a habit whenever we're on a travel shoot of making my way down at the hotel. Go down to the hotel bar, have a night cap, and I'll just find the oldest people in there that are by themself. And just a gentle, "Hey, what's up man? How are you doing?" "Good, good." And I'm not getting, I'm hitting 'em up for business. Okay? That's not what I'm doing. I just visit and it means the world to people. The more isolated they are, the more I would encourage you to just say hello. You know, you can go to the old folks homes, the retirement communities. Absolutely. That's a place to fish for them but more broadly, when you're in line at your HEB or wherever the hell you guys grocery shop in Arizona, say hello to that old lady in front of you and tell her to have a good day.
Mike: That is extremely important. There's so many people, it's like, "Man, I don't wanna talk to this person again 'cause they're gonna be on the phone for 45 minutes." But I'm like, you know, because they don't have anyone to talk to. But I was like, going, Mike, you know, it's like, cut that out 'cause the stories that they tell. There's this old couple, he's passed on, she's barely hanging on. They owned one of the largest drag racing boat companies. He dragged raced boats and they ran, you know, Miss Budweiser and all those things, you know?
Chance: Maybe the stories aren't as grand as that. Maybe they're smaller, you know what I mean? Maybe he was a welder for 40 years. But the wisdom comes out like going to them for advice. I do. What the hell does an old dude know about digital video working? Nothing. But they tend to know about common sense decision making that we tend to screw up more often.
Mike: Yeah, that's right. It's like how? How have you been married for 65 years?
Chance: Totally. What's the secret? Well, I can already tell you that I've asked 500 people that, what's the secret? Yeah. Happy wife, happy life. That's the secret. That's the secret.
Mike: I learned it. Two words. Yes, ma'am.
Chance: So they're powerful. You get anything you want, dude.
Mike: Yeah. That's great. Everybody again, it's Chance McClain with Heritage Films, if you are interested. I've already been on his website. Are there any examples? What people can sit there and say, "Hey, I can do this, or I can do this and what does it looks like?"
Chance: Yeah. There are samples on the website as well as just to further confuse your audience, which is a gift of mine. farmandranchfilms.com is our company too. For the agrarian life people, there's samples of what they look like. There's testimonials on the website, which I think are just as powerful. People often say, "Hey, can you send me a full film?" And I have had clients that have allowed me to release their full film. They're like, "Yeah, for sure." But it's hard because your Dad is your Dad and the nuanced elements of his story are just some old man rambling to somebody else, but to you, "That's my Dad. That's him." "Oh my gosh. I remember that." And if you reach out again, I, what I tend to do is, if somebody's, after they've told me, here's who I am, if they're doing it for themself. I'll find a clip that's germane to their existence. So if they're an oil and gas guy, I can pick one of those. If they're a Naval veteran, I'll send you a clip from a dude from UDT team or UDT Class 2.
Mike: That's fascinating. Those guys are just currently. Well, Chance, thank you so much for coming on Richer Geek. It's been a pleasure everybody, Heritage Films, Chance McClain. Check it out and you don't have to have been the owner of, you know, a hundred hotels or anything like that. You just have to have family or just something to a story, right?
Chance: That's it. Everyone's got a story to tell and Mike, thank you so much, man. This has been a blast. Enjoy visiting with you.
Mike: Absolutely. Take care.
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ABOUT CHANCE MCCLAIN
Chance McClain is a storyteller at heart, with roots in filmmaking, radio, and theater. As founder of Heritage Films, he’s produced over 800 documentaries that preserve family stories and legacies across generations. An Army veteran and creative force, his career spans sports radio, Broadway musicals, and award-nominated films. Today, Chance leads Heritage Films with a focus on authenticity and artistry, inspiring others to see the value in preserving their own stories.