After serving in the U.S. Army, Ballard attended film school at UCLA, where one of his classmates was Francis Ford Coppola.
He directed a short subject called The Perils of Priscilla (1969), which was filmed from the point of view of a cat who escapes from home.
[6] He shot the title sequence of Coppola's 1968 musical Finian's Rainbow and was second unit cinematographer on Star Wars (1977), for which he handled many of the outdoor desert scenes.
Ballard finally got the chance to make a feature film when Coppola offered him the job of directing The Black Stallion (1979), an adaptation of the children's book by Walter Farley.
[13] Kenneth Turan once wrote: "[Ballard] knows how to be both caring and restrained, minimizing a movie's saccharine content while maximizing the sense of wonder.