Finding Success In Your Passion

Finding what you want to do for a living can often be a journey.

For some, it may take years and various trials and tribulations before they find their dream occupation. Others know what they want to do at a young age.

A journalist, photographer, videographer, and director, Elton Hubner is driven to capture life through a camera lens.

“When it was 15, I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew I wanted to become a storyteller. I wasn’t sure how that would happen, whether online, in print, in radio writing books. I knew I wanted to learn about other people about their lives and share those stories with the world.”

Elton has experienced much of the world before settling in Vancouver, Canada. By the age of 20, Elton had been to 25 countries and learned six languages, and was determined to become a war-time journalist. As time passed, Elton realized he might want to have a family one day, own a house, and see his kids grow up safely with their dad next to them. However, he continued his passion in a far less precarious form, photographing for newspapers, blogs, magazines and the German international broadcaster DW (Deutsche Welle).

While pursuing his Master’s degree in Berlin, Germany, Elton realized technology and videography were outpacing print journalism and decide to dedicate himself to full-time video production, eventually creating his media company Eyes Multimedia. However, it was not an easy task.

“When I came here ten years ago, I had $1,500 in my pocket, and I didn’t have a job. That’s when I arrived, and today, only ten years later, there are so many things that I could accomplish. I chose Canada because this is the land of opportunities, and many things come down to the person’s mindset. You will find hundreds of reasons not to achieve any of your dreams if you have the wrong mindset.”

When Elton isn’t creating visual marketing strategies with photography and video production, he’s conceiving new passion projects and stories to tell.  One of Elton’s most recent successes is “The Fit Generation,” a self-funded documentary about active seniors on the West Coast that, as a journalist, Elton felt the urge to tell. The documentary has won awards in the U.S. and Europe, including San Francisco and London.

“There are people in their seventies and mid-eighties who ski every day, and some who run marathons. There’s a woman, 85 years old, and she broke the world record in the marathon run and half marathon. The message in the film is that you can always keep pushing forward no matter what your problems are.”

Seeing this film succeed wasn’t the only happiness Elton saw from the “Fit Generation,” starting a relationship with his future wife at the beginning of production. Elton says she helped him along the entire three and a half year process, and before the documentary even came out, they were married and had a child, which shows just how long these projects can take.

With this project behind him, Elton turns his focus to another passion project, a platform for seniors.

That is something that is always in the back of my mind. Oh, I need to start working on that. I would love to have, you know, a place, a community that begins with the website and maybe social media where, where people in their late sixties and said sorry. People in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties can find entertaining information, video and blog interviews, and podcasts. People in their twenties and then thirties and even forward is, I think, are so used to podcasts now. And I would love to bring that to seniors as well. So that’s one of the many, many, many passion projects.”

Written by Ryan Funk