If you've watched MDMotivator videos for any length of time, you've seen Patrick Glaz's work without ever really seeing him. He's the guy ten or fifteen feet away with the camera, capturing strangers' reactions in a way that makes you feel like you're standing right there in the moment. He's also been a friend of Zachery Dereniowski's since long before MDMotivator was a household name.

Here's what we know about the quiet creative force behind so many of the videos that built the MDMotivator brand.

A Hometown Partnership

Patrick is a professional photographer and videographer based in Windsor, Ontario, the same hometown he shares with Zachery. He runs his own brand under the handle @glazz_images, and operates a professional photography business at glazzimages.ca, offering portrait, wedding, and commercial work.

His role as Zachery's filming partner is well-documented in coverage from the early MDMotivator years. The Windsor Star profiled both of them together in October 2021, with photographer Dan Janisse capturing Zachery holding one of his signs outside Devonshire Mall and explicitly identifying Patrick as the cameraman behind the videos. Around the same time, the two were already telling local Windsor media that they planned to eventually relocate to a major U.S. city to keep growing the project.

In August 2022, both appeared together in studio on Windsor's Country 95.9 radio show, with Patrick credited prominently as the videographer of the operation. By that point, the MDMotivator format — Zachery up front with a sign, Patrick filming from a respectful distance — was already locked in as the visual signature of the brand.

Patrick in His Own Words

In June 2022, Patrick gave an in-depth interview to Shoutout SoCal that's still one of the best windows into how he thinks about the work. He described his profession as a photographer and videographer doing portrait, wedding, commercial, and social experiment shoots. He talked openly about how working alongside Zachery had reshaped his sense of purpose, crediting their collaboration with helping him realize that helping people is what genuinely makes him happy.

He also described his own parallel concept: walking up to random strangers, asking if he could photograph them, and turning each shoot into a brief conversation built around a single question — what makes you happy in life? The format echoes Zachery's, but it's distinctly Patrick's, expressed through a camera lens instead of a cardboard sign.

That same Shoutout SoCal piece described Patrick's combined social audience, at the time, as around 200,000 followers. He has continued growing his @glazz_images presence in the years since.

The Aesthetic He Helped Build

Even setting aside the question of his current day-to-day involvement, Patrick deserves credit for shaping the early visual grammar of MDMotivator. The Windsor Star piece from 2021 captures Zachery describing the labor behind the format — a 30-second video taking roughly four hours to record and another two hours to edit. None of that volume of work happens without a videographer who's deeply bought in.

A few choices that defined the look from the beginning, and that fans still associate with the channel:

The camera shoots from a respectful distance, which kept the strangers comfortable and the footage natural rather than performed. Both Zachery and the subject tend to appear in the same frame, so you feel the connection rather than seeing a typical influencer-and-subject reverse cut. Available light gets used rather than fought, leaning into the natural feel of busy streets, parking lots, malls, and pawn shops. And the editing pace is patient — knowing when to cut, when to linger, and when to let silence sit.

Those aren't flashy choices. They're disciplined ones, and they were established in the formative years when Patrick was unambiguously the cameraman behind nearly everything.

What's Less Clear in 2026

Here's where we have to be honest as fans, because the MDMotivator operation has changed dramatically in the last few years.

The strong public sourcing for Patrick as Zachery's primary videographer is concentrated in 2021 and 2022 — the early viral years, when the project was still essentially two friends from Windsor making videos together. Since then, MDMotivator has scaled into something much bigger. There are major sponsor partnerships with BetterHelp, Air Canada, KIND Snacks, and iMerchant. There are coordinated celebrity productions involving Big Sean and the Detroit Pistons, Taraji P. Henson, Ice Cube and BIG3, Daniel Lubetzky, Drake, and Beast Games season 2 winner Tyler Lucas. There's a Slingshot fundraising platform, a charity, a foundation, and a clothing brand running in parallel.

A project at that scale typically involves a larger production team, and there's no current public reporting that explicitly confirms or details Patrick's day-to-day role on every video shot today. Patrick's own brand and photography business remain active, and the original MDMotivator visual style is still recognizable in current videos, but the specifics of who's behind the camera in 2026 isn't something a fan site can responsibly state without a current source.

What we can say with confidence: Patrick was the visual co-author of the MDMotivator format during the years that established it. The aesthetic fans love — the unscripted feel, the patient framing, the candid emotional moments — was built collaboratively between the two of them.

A Real Friendship, Not Just a Working One

One of the more telling details about Patrick and Zachery's relationship comes from Patrick's own Shoutout SoCal interview, where he described Zach not just as a colleague but as a close friend whose influence had pushed him to grow as both a photographer and a person. He spoke about Zach with genuine warmth, crediting him as one of the people most responsible for the direction of his own career.

That kind of mutual respect doesn't tend to disappear, even when projects scale and roles shift. Whether or not Patrick is behind every camera today, the friendship that built MDMotivator was real — and a meaningful chunk of what fans love about the channel was filmed by him.

Where to Follow Patrick Today

If you love the look and feel of MDMotivator's videos, following Patrick directly is one of the best moves you can make as a fan. You'll find his work at:

His own street photography series — those what makes you happy? portraits — runs on the same emotional wavelength as MDMotivator and is worth a follow on its own merits.

Coming Up Next

Now that we've covered the people behind MDMotivator, the next question is how the videos actually get made. Our next article goes inside the production process — the four-hour shoots, the two-hour edits, the unscripted approach, and why nothing in an MDMotivator video is ever planned in advance.

Sources

Note: Strong public sourcing identifying Patrick Glaz as MDMotivator's videographer is concentrated in 2021–2022. His current role on individual videos as of 2026 is not specified in publicly available reporting we've been able to locate.

This article is part of an independent fan site dedicated to documenting the work, life, and impact of Zachery Dereniowski (MDMotivator). We are not affiliated with Zachery, his team, Kindness Is Cool, the Mental Health Movement, the KindnessWithZachery Foundation, or any of his sponsors. All content is researched and written by fans, sourced from public material, and intended as celebratory and informational. To follow Zachery directly, visit @mdmotivator on TikTok or Instagram.