Greg Mulvey.
I’ve been telling stories for a living since I was ten, doing magic shows. By the late 90s, Presto Productions was the name on my design work, and the work was mostly for other magicians. They needed websites, and I was a magician who knew how to build one. They needed video, and I already knew how a performance had to be shot to look as good on screen as it did in the room. Nobody had to tell me which angle would show the mirror. Everything since has been a version of the same job: understand the business from the inside, then tell its true story to the people who need to hear it.
Where the craft came from.
Live webcasts, 1997 to 2001. I left Columbia to become Director of Live Webcast Production at RollingStone.com, running multicamera live concert webcasts back when almost nobody was doing them. Christina Aguilera, blink-182, Metallica, Dave Matthews Band, Red Hot Chili Peppers. I also built the first on-demand music video library on the site. I was nineteen when I started.
Video for a magic retailer, 2004 to 2010. I was the video department for one of the largest magic retailers in the world: the shooting concepts, the locations, the green screen studio, every shoot and every edit, including the trailers. Las Vegas years, and a stack of projects I kept cutting after I moved back. Adobe and CreativeCOW both featured the work.
Post-production at The Second City, 2010 to 2016. I built and led the post-production department, worked as lead editor, and did motion graphics and projection design. The campaigns I led in post there won a PRSA Silver Anvil and landed a Shorty finalist nod, and some of that work is written up in Yes, And, the HarperCollins book about the company’s method.
Adobe, on and off for twenty years. Consultant, NAB presenter, and the subject of an official Creative Suite case study by name in 2012.
Websites since 1996. Longer than most people guess, and the part they are usually most surprised by.
One thing, for a small number of businesses.
I find the true stories inside a local business and tell them everywhere its customers look: the photographs, the video, the website, the words on it, and the search results that got somebody there. Strategy, direction, and production in one set of hands, because the reason most marketing feels disconnected is that four different people made it.
I take a small number of these relationships at a time. That is not scarcity marketing, it is arithmetic. There is one of me.
I also run Presto Productions.
Presto is the other half of the practice: a video and web agency for performers, theaters, orchestras, and arts organizations. Different audience, different work, same person. If you are a magician or a theater, that is the door you want.
I live here, which turns out to matter.
I grew up in Downers Grove, moved to Naperville around 1988, and went to Naperville North. I am the Naperville Area Chamber of Commerce’s photography and video partner. I have been the volunteer media strategist for the local education foundation since 2017. I spent seven years on an elementary school home and school board and thirteen in Scouting leadership, and I am an Eagle Scout, which I mention only because it explains a certain amount about how I run a shoot.
The thing underneath all of it.
It’s all storytelling. A live concert webcast, a compliance course people actually watch, a steak logo, a family in a park: each one is somebody’s true story, told so someone new gets it the way the regulars already do. I’ve been doing magic shows since I was six, and it’s still the same job.
More of the history is on LinkedIn.
Your turn.
You have now read quite a lot about me. I would rather hear about you. Thirty minutes about your business, and if I am the wrong fit I will say so and point you at who is not.