We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Hunter Thomas Candelaria a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hunter Thomas, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?
A lot of my optimism comes from the fictional characters of that of Superman and Spider-Man. Both characters go through hardest times but know they try to leave the world in a better place than they had before.
For myself, I’m someone who sees the challenges and internal feel the exhaustion of what has to get done, but go in strong and anyone I work with – keep their spirits up.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m a film director and photographer who’s personal goal within my career is to explore fictional stories that seems relate to our own personal adventures. Most of my stories have been in the horror genre, such as Stalking the Stalker that won best horror film at the Allentown Film Festival.
My brand is based in a vintage style, 90s all the way to the 40s. I love movies of those eras and wish to give the impression that my work was taken out of a time capsule.
As of 2025, I will be working on my own personal feature film “Damaged” that will emulate the films of Halloween and Methodic but with a Universal Studios monster film twist.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
When it comes to my journey, the three most important skills I have learned is patience, personal drive, and simplicity.
A lot of what I’ve seen is the more complex things can easily be broken down and accomplished through just a person’s want to do something. In the field that I’ve been in, I’ve heard and seen – that you don’t have to know anything about what you’re doing, but if you have a vision of what you wanna do you can do it by just starting. You will not be perfect at all at first, but starting is the important part.
My advice for many is, don’t strive for perfection at the beginning. It’ll never happen. You can try, but you will fail. Over and over. But the fact you’re trying something that no one else is doing is a bigger step than most. Eventually once you get started on anything, you still won’t be perfect but you’ll be able to stand up tall and say to everyone and yourself, “I did that” with pride.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
In my opinion and in the eyes of Steve Jobs, a great leader knows their strengths but is aware of their weaknesses. I believe that you should give a try to the things that you are not great in, just you can have an idea of what it’s like to do the task. Then once you understand the challenge, hire another or others to complete the task. This way two things happened; in the case that you have no one to help, you can still accomplish the difficultly maybe not as good but it’ll still get done. Or if you hire someone (or partner), you know the effort it takes to do so and you are aware of the time and pay it takes.
Personally for me, in my field, sound is the absolute Bane of my existence. Nothing about it makes sense to me and the more I learn about it the less I know; however, I know the basics of how to record it and edit it. In that case, I recently hired a person from New York to come down to where we were shooting our film ‘Halloween: Noir” in Bally, PA. And when his rate came in, I didn’t blink and eye (a true pro rate) as I knew it was were I failed at many times, and I’d rather have someone who knows what their doing elevate our project higher, then just be okay or bad because I didn’t know what I was doing.
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Anmar Q Chaleby (NiteTea, President)
Nina Andrea (@antaninaamihava)
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