Mike Mulliniks spent twenty years making records in Nashville — playing guitar, building studios, producing albums for anyone brave enough to hand him their songs. Then he picked up a camera and realized he’d been training for it the whole time. Film, it turns out, is just music you can see: rhythm, dynamics, tension, release. Same language, different vocabulary.

These days he’s based in Detroit, directing and shooting everything from theatrical features to national commercials to documentaries that start with “so there’s this village in Kenya…” Somewhere along the way, crews started calling him “Swiss Army Mike,” and he owns it. He’s mixed sound on narrative features, run VTR, jumped on DIT, and hauled Mombo Stands when the grip truck was light — not because he can’t sit still, but because knowing how every department breathes makes him a better director. He’s fast, he’s calm, and after 30+ countries’ worth of things going sideways, he is genuinely hard to surprise.

He’s made work for scrappy nonprofits and Fortune 500 brands, and he brings the same appetite to both: big ideas, obsessive details, and a point of view — because nobody ever fell in love with a mood board.

Off set he’s a husband, a dad of two, an ASA-certified sailor, and an FAA Part 107 drone pilot. Translation: if the shot is on the water, in the air, or on the other side of the planet, he’ll figure out how to get it.

His favorite part of the job is the part before the job — sitting with other artists, dreaming out loud, asking “what if we…” until something catches fire. If you’ve got a project rattling around in your head, that’s usually where the good stuff starts.