Trevor Ward didn’t study film making. His background is in engineering, and that lead him to a job at Mattel Toys, a stint as a consultant, and owning his own landscaping business, specializing in building koi ponds. Film making was just a hobby for him, and then people started to notice, and request his services.
Ward has been working as a freelance video professional for five years. He has produced and directed several short documentaries including Mother Teresa Remembered, Dung for Dollars, and 30-day Sex Challenge, as well as having directed and edited a short film for the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida that won the Grand Image award for the Florida Public Relations Association.
“Documentaries are what I am passionate about,” said Ward recently. “Scripted entertainment is good, but it is way harder. So many more people are involved. It’s a big deal. To get really good is difficult.”
The challenge of presenting the story is what attracts him to the documentary director’s role. “A really good documentary film maker can make anybody’s life really interesting,” said Ward. “In drawing out that story, I think that’s where the biggest challenge is for a director of a documentary, but also the reward.”
“I can entertain people, I can connect with people emotionally, and I can inspire people. I love that.”
On most of his projects so far, not only is he the producer and director, but the editor, sound man and the cameraman as well. “It’s kind of a one man band,” he said, and then added later, “There’s an advantage to being a one man band, I can get that intimacy that may not ever happen with a big crew.”
His feature-length documentary, I Met With An Accident, will have its premiere in Orlando September 29th, at the Cobb Theater Plaza Cinema Cafe in downtown Orlando. The majority of the feature length documentary was filmed in Calcutta, India and tells the story of Benedict Das, who was seriously injured in a bus accident. The inspirational film tells of how that one event changed so much about Das’s life.
Ward has several more projects in the planning stage, including more involving India. “The Indian people, they really are a very interesting culture, they’re very sweet people, and they’re very receptive to strangers.”
The Orlando resident is intrigued by the cultural co-mingling he sees in India between the poverty, the rich, the 21st century and the 18th century. He tells a story of a barefoot, nearly naked man pulling a rickshaw down a street. He watches as the man pauses and pulls out a cell phone from his loin cloth, and marvels at the irony of the scene.
“I feel like I’m living the American Dream. I’m not rich, I don’t the have riches of that, but that’s not the American Dream. The American Dream is if there is something you want to do and you work at it you can create your own reality. There is no government system that is holding you down. Opportunities abound.”