From the Irons brothers to John John Florence
Bill Ballard was born in 1967 at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and he didn't start surfing until he was 18. In 1993 he moved to Kauai and bought his first video camera. In the mid-1990s he started traveling with a young Andy Irons and his brother Bruce, and in 1994 he founded Billygoat Productions. He taught himself to shoot, working in every format from Hi8 video to 16mm and 35mm film.
His first film, Insanity, was shot on Hi8 in February 1995, with Sonny Miller as his technical director and mentor. Rise and Shine, made the same year for Hawaiian Island Creations, featured the HIC team with Andy Irons. Side B followed in 1997. Over the next decade Billygoat delivered more than 20 surf films, along with documentaries and TV shows.
In 1998 he made Blue Crush, a women's surf film with Lisa Andersen, Layne Beachley, Rochelle Ballard, Keala Kennelly and a 15-year-old Sofia Mulanovich, four years before the Hollywood movie. When the feature film Blue Crush was made in 2002, its producers licensed the title from Bill, and he shot the behind-the-scenes footage. He kept filming the best women surfers in Poetic Silence (2001), set in the Mentawai Islands, and The Modus Mix (2003).
With water cinematographers Larry Haynes and Jeff Doner and editor Ryan Ray, Billygoat turned out film after film: These Are Better Days (1999) at the Gotcha Tahiti Pro at Teahupo‘o, team films for O'Neill, Revelation (2000) shot entirely on 16mm, Iratika (2001) and The Mystic (2004), shot on 35mm and 16mm. In 2001 he produced The Union Blue Project for pro surfer Jason Bogle, who had been diagnosed with a rare bone cancer, with sections by 15 cinematographers, among them Sonny Miller, Larry Haynes, Don King and Taylor Steele. In 2008 came Archy, a feature-length documentary on Matt Archbold, narrated by Henry Rollins, with the interview by Craig Hoffmann.
From 2014 to 2017 he worked and traveled with John John Florence. He produced the award-winning film View From a Blue Moon, then directed and produced Twelve, a seven-part series presented by Hurley that followed John John's 2016 campaign for his first world title.
In 2017 Bill and his family moved from the North Shore of Oahu to Portland, Oregon, where he worked as a freelance producer for ad agencies including North, Instrument and Nemo. In 2025 he moved back to Hawaii.
