Pulling Stunts
Crowdfire Spotlight: The adventures of a stuntwoman, athlete, eco-friendly entrepreneur and YouTube travel host — this is Alice Ford’s story.
Alice Ford wears many hats. She’s an awe-inspiring athlete, an adrenaline-loving stuntwoman, an actress, a YouTuber, and CEO of a sustainable travel start-up, but above all, she’s an Earth-loving explorer. Alice has been all over the world and she’s ushering in a new age of eco-tourism and greater environmental consciousness in the travel industry with her work on green-certified hotels and vacation rentals.
Working as a stunt woman for blockbuster Hollywood movies and running her own YouTube channel covering World Heritage Sites, travel tips and eco-friendly ways to live, her experiences are manifold and eye-opening, fuelled by her love for all things outdoors. Don’t be surprised if you feel inspired to lace up and go for a run after reading her story 😉
Land of Lore
Like most kids, Alice Ford grew up listening to tales of adventure in dangerous foreign lands. Unlike the tales told to her peers, though, these were completely non-fictional. And the storyteller? None other than her own father. A mountaineer, a ski patrolman and a river guide, Father Ford was a true outdoorsman — spending weeks on mountains out in the middle of the wind and snow, trekking out to places most people will never see in their lifetimes.
Alice grew up with stories of his travels all over the world in the sixties and seventies — venturing out to places at a time with no running water and only kerosene lamps as a light source. He spent a lot of time in the Grand Canyons and went skiing on the slopes of Colorado, often taking the entire family along. The Fords would travel constantly, heading to renowned places like Chichén Itzá while spending time in Mexico and going all over the US including to Yellowstone and other prominent National Parks.
Her father’s outgoing nature inevitably rubbed off on little Alice and she harboured her own dreams of fantastic explorations and adventurous travel.
“I really looked up to my dad. It all sounded like so much fun!” As they say, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Alice fell in love with glorious Mother Nature and at a very young age, she became obsessed with travelling and exploring different cultures, just like her father. Growing up on a lake in New Hampshire, situated in a great big wooded area, Alice spent most of her summers out boating, water-skiing, hiking, and climbing around the area.
Meanwhile, in school, Alice’s proclivities for nature and outdoorsy activities translated into active extracurriculars. She took up gymnastics when she was eight and pursued it all throughout high school and college. She learned pole vaulting and spring board diving as well as track and field.
For Alice, the impact of sports in her life has been significant. “Sports taught me a lot of discipline,” she acknowledges, “and some other really important life lessons — how to be motivated, how to follow through, how to stay dedicated, and how to manage my time efficiently.”
One place to another
After finishing high school, Alice attended the University of Vermont for two years. Finding the weather far too cold for her liking, and preferring the heat of summer all year round, Alice transferred to the University of Arizona. She finished her undergraduate degree in Sociology and Public Administration and went on to score her Master’s in Environmental Management from the University of Maryland.
Degrees in hand, Alice took up a position at Vitamin Water and proceeded to work in the Sales department for the next five years. However, she never quite felt at home. “Even though I was really good at what I was doing, it wasn’t really what I wanted to do,” she explains. So she left and started travelling wherever she could, jumping on every opportunity. She moved to Savannah, Georgia for a while and opened up two bars. Soon after, in 2010, she took off for the Bahamas, where she worked at the esteemed Atlantis resort, staying on the property.
She talks excitedly of her time there, revelling in the refreshing mornings she experienced. “The best part was getting to wake up, throw my flip flops on the side of the path outside the hotel and run on the beach before I had breakfast, come back in, have a coffee and then go to work.” Alice would frequently visit fascinating marine creatures in their watery chambers, greeting the leopard sharks with reverence and happiness, loving life in a place known for its magnificent marine habitat and aquariums. “That was a really special time in my life,” she smiles, remembering.
She moved to New Orleans next, where she started working in films as an extra. After landing a few meetings with influential people in the business, she ended up getting into stunts. She’d also continued in track and field as a competitive athlete in the meantime. Alice recalls a momentous turning point in her career. The managing board for competitive athletes for US track and field sent her an email with an invitation to Italy for a modern art symposium, La Biennale, where many countries participated.
Team USA had chosen an artist to display an overturned army tank with a treadmill on top. To symbolize that humans keep freedom moving, the artist wanted to requisition runners that would jog on the treadmill. Taken aback but excited at the prospect, Alice went along as one of the runners to Venice and stayed on. “Getting to live in another city is a whole different experience. It’s what I’d recommend to fellow travellers. If you’re going to be there for a while then you should really immerse yourself.“
Go ahead and jump!
For Alice, her work at the Venice exhibition led to an unexpected opportunity. One of the other athletes there, a male Olympic gymnast, had worked on a popular TV show out in LA that was all about gymnastics. After Alice shared her own gymnast past with him, he managed to land her a role the following year as a stunt double on the show. You might’ve heard of it — Make it or Break it. With this, she got her foot in the door for more stunt work. After six years in the industry, Alice loves her job more than ever, especially since it gives her the opportunity to keep travelling.
Alice has worked on some notable Hollywood productions like Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight — two parts of the popular live-action franchise. She’s currently working on the next instalment, Bumblebee, due for release by end of 2018. On her first Transformers outing, Alice got to travel to China, Cambodia, Australia, Bali, and Malaysia. There she shot whole episodes of World Heritage Adventures, one of her YouTube channel segments.
By this time, Alice had also started her blog and was posting videos of her travels there as well as on her YouTube channel. She talks effusively about her blog and how she wants to grow it. “If I have a really deep connection with a place, I like to write about it. There are a lot of places I could write travel guides about. I’ll take the time to do that eventually.”
“If I have a really deep connection with a place, I like to write about it.”
As someone who’s travelled all over the world, it’s been easy for Alice to accumulate tonnes of memorable experiences. She attributes her exciting life to the examples her free-spirited parents set for her. “My life has been such a journey,” she gushes. “But there are still a million things I want to accomplish.”
Last year, Alice travelled solo to Portugal. She took a two week trip there, hiking to the tallest mountains there by herself in the dark. “At the time, I was thinking to myself, ‘Is this a smart idea? I’m not sure.’ But seeing the peak at sunrise was incredible and worth it. I think there’s just a lot of moments I’ve had that have been like that, really soothing on the soul.” Ever since, she’s been exultant about solo travel, advocating its benefits to anyone she knows who can handle it.
Bandaids won’t cut it
But Alice has had her own share of terrifying experiences too, one of which she recalls with some discomfort. When she was 21 years old, she was robbed at gunpoint in her house. At the time, she was in a relationship with someone who associated with drug dealers. “I don’t know if it was him but I was home alone and some people came in my backdoor and broke in with big guns. They pistol whipped my dog, dislocated my shoulder and tried to beat me up. But they ended up leaving eventually.”
It was hard for Alice to continue living alone after that incident. She found it hard not to be afraid. The impact of that event remains in her life. “Even now, I don’t like living in big houses. I like places where I can see all the doors. But it was something I had to get over quickly out of necessity, so I did. That was a tough time for me, trying to be resilient. I’m glad I was able to get over it quickly, since most people get sidelined when something like this happens to them.”
Being in stunts also means facing the inevitable — you’re bound to get hurt sometimes. Alice has had her fair share of bumps and bruises in her career as a stuntwoman. But the worst injuries she’s suffered so far she earned on the high-octane sets of Transformers 4. She was in an on-set car crash which left her with a concussion. A few weeks after that, she was shooting a scene where she had to run onto a small truck, jump, and grab a rope. But she peeled off after making the grab, flew through the air and landed sickeningly on her head. She suffered yet another concussion and got six stitches for that stunt.
“Generally, we try to make the stunts that we do as safe as possible,” Alice explains. “We often have wires or lines attached to make it so that even if you mess up, someone has your back on the ground to keep you safe.” But one’s gotta wonder, still, how stunt people deal with the constant fear their job engenders.
“There’s always fear. If you’re not afraid, then you’re probably not thinking. The first time is always scary but as long as you know what you’re doing and you’re confident, a lot of that fear goes away, depending on your mindset. Knowing the skill you’re doing or the jump well is important. There’s always a dose of fear in a movie as far as stunts go. Accidents do happen, because there are so many variables and so many things that are happening that you can’t control.”
Ready, on set, wing it!
Depending on the movie, most of the time, Alice and her colleagues have several weeks of prep time — to learn the choreography and for fight and wire-work training. They have time to try and get back in shape if they’re out of form, learn the foot choreography, and know all of the moves well before they perform them.
“On a personal level, staying in shape is important for my job. I try to work out at least five days a week, eat healthy, drink a lot of water. Even when I can’t workout, I try to walk and always keep moving. It helps that I love hiking and doing outdoor activities. It makes it a lot easier to get motivated to get up and go.”
Alice found working for Michael Bay, director of the Transformers franchise, a stressful situation in general. “He’s a high-energy, high-expectation person, and so your senses of nervousness are always really heightened when you’re working on his movies.” She continues describing her experiences with him, admiring his work ethic and dedication to his vision. “He likes everything done quickly and correctly the first time. You have no idea what you’re doing so you have to wing it a lot of the times,” she laughs.
As far as knowing what to do for a stunt scene goes — “You just have to hope that you’re doing exactly what Michael thought it should look like, even though he didn’t tell you what he thought! That’s probably the most challenging.” She talks about the physically challenging aspects of her work, mostly being in a harness with mere wires supporting her body weight. “There are times when you’re getting thrown in the air and falling down, or rolling down a hill. You get battered up, sore, and end up with a lot of bruises the next day. But hey, it’s all part of the job!”
Staying green
Every day is an incredible experience for Alice. She strives to see the positive in every situation because she understands that there are always going to be trials and tribulations. “I’ve had some amazing things happen to me and some not so amazing things as well. But this year has been a particularly good year for me with my blog and my other business which is sustainable travel.”
Last November, she launched her website, Travganic, a sustainable travel venture focused completely on green-certified hotels and tours. “We have four thousand hotels on the website that are specifically green-certified and I just announced out first women-only group tour to Kilimanjaro in March of next year. We have 20 slots open for women that want to come with me so I’m really pumped for that and hope people sign up and join me!”
Eco tourism, environmental sustainability, and conservation have always been things that have been really important for Alice. Her father was a big advocate for environmental non-profit groups like the Sierra Club (the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization) and Nature Conservancy.
Alice remembers receiving mail from them and hearing her dad talk about the importance of forests and the ecosystem. “Even back then, we were starting to see the effects of climate change with different species. There was a squirrel that lived by our house. As the weather got warmer, that squirrel moved further north and we got a new breed. That was all from climate change.”
Alice wanted to create something that stressed the importance of ecological lifestyles and helped people understand the kind of footprint their hotel or vacation home or destination can have on its surrounding area.
“It’s easy to book a hotel or tour somewhere and not be aware of the kind of impact it has on the local community or the local environment.”
“I think that our society has become indifferent,” she laments. “It seem like people don’t care anymore! I’m glad that the younger generation that’s growing up right now seems to be really starting to care about the environment. But I think there’s this large swathe of the world, definitely the US, that thinks it’s somebody else’s problem.”
This spurs Alice on to try and inform people, not only with her website and her blog, but also through the videos she makes for her YouTube channel. “There are so many things you can do differently that aren’t difficult that could help you and the world around you. It (being eco-friendly) has great benefits and we all share this planet so we should be doing something to protect it. That’s my M.O. with my website and YT channel.”
Social media, hydrogen cell cars, and Will Smith
Every day in the life of Alice Ford is different. Once a week, she sits down for a couple of hours to schedule her social media posts for the rest of the week. A lot of her time is spent on writing, researching new articles, making YouTube videos, shooting, editing, and working on her website.
Alice talks about her struggles growing her brand and business online using social media. She’s taken some courses on SEO and tries to read a lot of blogs to keep up to date with social media and figure out what content works better. “The reason I’ve been able to grow my Twitter so well is by engaging with brands that share the same core beliefs as I do.”
Alice notes that it’s easy to reach out to brands around eco travel with a small message introducing herself and what she can offer. “You’d be surprised at how many brands message you back or tweet back at you. I try to tag brands on Twitter around relevant content.” In fact, last year, Alice got invited by Toyota to go to the Environmental Media Awards as a result of her Twitter account. They picked her up in their new Toyota hydrogen fuel cell car. Afterwards, at the awards, lucky Alice got to sit next to famous celebrity, Will Smith! “Yeah,” she grins sheepishly, “that was definitely a highlight for me.”
Her schedule gets changed up when she’s working on a movie. For the movie she’s currently working on, she wakes up at 5:30 in the morning, drinks coffee in her room, does 50 sit-ups (wow!) and squats before heading out the door. Then it’s breakfast and hanging around on set for 12 to 14 hours depending on the day and the script. If it’s a dialogue heavy day, she can get home and catch up on her emails.
Fun fact, Alice has nine email addresses. That’s seven email addresses too many! But she explains with a laugh, “I have one for spam since high school, one for stunts, one for travel writing and one for my website. My blog itself has three email address — a newsletter email, a personal email and an information email.”
When she’s back in LA, she gets around to auditioning for commercials, hosting jobs, training for stunts, and trying to find some adventure.
Looking forward
Alice is excited about growing Travganic, her sustainable travel website. She wants to incorporate vacation rentals, wanting to open a market for green-certified rentals, with apps like AirBnB growing ever more popular. She also fervently hopes to start her own travel show one day, something she’s working towards by consistently adding videos to her YouTube channel.
Clearly, Alice has an exhaustive list of accomplishments. So how does she do it all? “If I have a big goal, I write it on a piece of paper and I put it on my fridge. When I was pole vaulting, I had a mantra which I wrote down on a piece of paper and put it on my fridge. It was something along the lines of ‘Be confident, You can do it, Don’t give up.’”
Alice strongly believes that everyone should come up with three things that help them build their confidence and get them to where they want to go. Then, repeating those three things every day will help you accomplish your goals. “For anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur, my advice is to really figure out within yourself what it is that you really want.”
“If you don’t know what you want, you’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons and you won’t be successful that way.”
Going along with that, Alice can’t stress enough the importance of educating yourself before starting up any venture. “Recently, I had someone reach out to me asking for help on their projects, stating that they’re really bad at business and at handling money. All I could think was, ‘If you want to run a business and make money, you should educate yourself on how the economy works before venturing out blindly.’”
Alice has been around a lot of people who think that success is easy and that just putting yourself out there will rake in the cash. But she has a response for anyone who feels entitled to the fruit of labor, “You can’t expect everything to fall into your lap because you’re trying.”
With decades of constantly pushing herself out of her comfort zone, testing her physical limits, exploring her entrepreneurial capabilities and viewing the world through an ecological lens, Alice has carved a special place for herself. Whether she’s flying through the air on set, educating her audience on the importance of preserving the environment or travelling wherever her feet carry her, Alice Ford is one amazing woman who’s always up for a new challenge.
Laced up your shoes, yet?
You can find Alice on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Blog, Website, Travganic Website
