Founder Profile: Nate Kresge

Nate Kresge admits his work sometimes annoys all of us once or twice a year, but that hasn’t stopped his company from growing.

Kresge’s Harrisburg-based GK Visual provides video and photography servicesb to both political and corporate clients in and around Harrisburg and beyond. That includes a steady stream of TV political ads, which most television viewers will admit can become tiresome after getting barraged during election season.

For Kresge, however, this work goes beyond mud-slinging or questionable boasts. “Art, emotion and story” is the company’s tagline and what Kresge looks to inject into every project his firm takes on. He recently added two full-time employees, including new partner and chief editor Doug Metz and producer Nick Chohany.

After graduating college I freelanced at a couple different places and landed a full-time job at Pennsylvania Cable Network and spent three years there, met a lot of great people. I left there and worked for a TV show, staying in touch with a lot of people from PCN. I started getting a lot of work on the side and started to think I could really make a go of this. On a limb and with a lot of support from my wife, I quit there and started filming any job I could. Getting a lot of those people I worked with at PCN to help me out along the way. It was a lot of renting gear and whenever I got paid for a job I went out and bought another piece of gear. We lived on my wife’s salary for awhile.

There were a lot of times I’d look at my wife Lauren and say ‘I’d be happy to work at McDonalds tomorrow if need be.’ It finally got to the point where we weren’t living paycheck to paycheck and having to rely on her salary as much. Every year since we’ve grown by leaps and bounds. I’m always amazed that people keep coming back.

Political races are funny and it’s the kind of thing where we strive to do the best job on very job no matter who or what it’s for. With political work, people are particular about who you’re working for. They don’t want you working for an opponent, obviously, but then there’s the politics of it. We’ve kind of become more of a Republican-based firm. We’ve done Democratic stuff in the past but mainly Republican, mainly because they like you to line up on one side or the other. We’ve had a lot of great clients and consultants that we work with.

When we started we didn’t know who we should target. We tried magazine ads but nothing really translated so a lot of our corporate work has come through political clients early on. People start to notice, ‘Man if you can make this politician look good, I’d love to see what you can do for us.’ I’m heading to Baltimore to do a shoot for Consol Energy and have been doing a number of projects for them. I really enjoy working on their stuff. We work with the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet and do their campaign videos and commercials every year. We’ve done stuff for the Hershey Medical Center and an Elizabethtown College promo video. It’s always amazing what comes through this door. A lot of arts stuff, too, along with industrial. We were shooting steel bending at Granier Industries the same week we shot the ballet dancers.

I still think it’s funny, being young and running your own business is tough, but trying to convince people you are a professional has been challenging. It doesn’t happen as much now as it used to. Out on a photo shoot people tell me how professional we are yet I still get the question ‘ So what do you for your day job?’
 

It has been great for us. A lot of our clients are right here even thought a lot of our work is remote. We’ve worked with clients in California, Georgia, just did a big video on Kentucky last year. But Harrisburg has been helpful with the political jobs. It’s easy for people to pop in and shoot a quick commercial. Harrisburg also offers a lot of great visual backdrops. It’s not too hard to jump into the country and shoot some open spaces and green and then get back into town for a city backdrop.

We’re in the works with SaraBozich.com (a Keystone Edge contributor) to create a show that would highlight people around Harrisburg. We’ll start online doing a webseries. As of now we’re calling it What’s On Tap with Sara Bozich.