Journey

I've been a hustler since I was a kid, shoveling driveways when it snowed, raking leaves in the fall, sweeping hair at a barbershop a few days a week after school. None of that was official, on-the-books work. My actual first real job came a little later, at a career resource center, teaching people how to fill out job applications and build resumes. I also picked up work at a local amusement park around that same stretch. By high school I was selling gum out of my locker, by the pack and by the piece, because even then I understood margins.

I always thought I'd end up somewhere creative. I was always interested in leveraging creative means to better serve my community and my clients. The real turning point was the Launch Lab at West Virginia University, a startup center where student entrepreneurs came to get their businesses off the ground. I worked there filming the classes and courses, and helping any entrepreneur who needed a video, a graphic, a logo, headshots, whatever it took. It was early enough in the social media era that understanding brand, video, and content wasn't standard yet. I was learning how businesses actually get built and how to make the content that tells their story, at the same time, in the same room.

I bought my first camera right before I graduated and never really stopped. I moved from West Virginia to Ohio, working with a production studio by day and building my own client work outside of it: music videos, websites, photography, graphics, whatever people needed. That stretch was as much about learning how to network and position myself professionally as it was about the work itself; I immersed myself in it. Somewhere in there I registered my first LLC: G Murray Studios, because I could never land on a better name than my own.

From Cincinnati I moved to Baltimore and DC, and the work widened. I shot listing photos and video for real estate agents, and helped a production company shoot episodes of their local real estate TV show. I photographed and filmed more than fifty weddings: Baltimore and DC, up through Philadelphia and New York, down to Florida, plus one commercial spot from that stretch that has its own story on the Experiences page. In college at Marshall, I'd met Roger Turner Jr., who was directing under his company, Upstream Pictures, and we kept making short films together: commercial work and festival submissions, seven-plus films total, usually with me as assistant director or director of photography, sometimes associate producer. I started running events too: a Futurist Showcase at Avi8ted House bringing entrepreneurs together at the intersection of real estate, tech, and culture, with a live panel discussion; a full solo art show in New York for an artist named Ladon Alex, where I built the entire experience, the bar, the lighting, hanging the work, an interview I filmed with him during the eight days he spent creating it, then a screening and Q&A the night of; and a fashion show I co-directed with independent brands from DC, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania that drew over 300 people, casting and rehearsing the models, designing the runway and lighting, building the whole space myself. I fell in love with producing events almost as much as I loved shooting them.

That love for events followed me to New York, where I bartended on the side while working Tribeca Film Festival, galas, and fashion shows, producing content and making connections everywhere I could.

In New York I also took a sales role at a CBD wellness company and, separately, an operations role at a fashion brand, where I helped secure a major order with FabFitFun before moving on to build my own thing again. After two and a half years in New York, I spent a year in New Orleans, and then, in February 2025, I stepped into the legal industry: first doing video work, now helping legal professionals build their personal brand the same way I've helped everyone else, by finding the real story and telling it well.