Welcome to VideoTakes, Inc., which was founded by me, Sandy Cannon-Brown, 40 years ago. I’m semi-retired, but I continue to make independent films, primarily focused on environmental issues. 

My long-time film partners, Writer Tom Horton and Photographer Dave Harp, and I were honored to receive the prestigious Bay Heritage Award from the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum at a ceremony on April 17 for our “significant contributions to environmental conservation and regional culture”. 

We join a distinguished list of only six former Bay Heritage Award honorees, including broadcast journalist and Edgartown summer resident Walter Cronkite, and authors James Michener and William Warner.  The first of our eight films, which premiered in 2015, was Beautiful Swimmers Revisited, based on Warner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay.

CBMM’s Chief Historian Pete Lesher (far left) presented environmental filmmakers (from left) Sandy Cannon-Brown, Dave Harp, and Tom Horton with the Bay Heritage Award. (Photo by George Sass)

My most recent project, One Bad Crab, premiered on Martha’s Vineyard March 9, 2025. The film was inspired by and based on a story with the same title in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine by Nelson Sigelman, writer and former editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Times. Sigelman hosts and narrates the film about the voracious, destructive, fecund, invasive European Green Crab. 

A Passion for Oysters. Oysters aren’t much to look at.  You could say they are true and literal sticks in the mud. Yet these humble bivalves have inspired piracy, shooting wars and centuries of social and environmental conflict.  All this ado about oysters is explored in our newest documentary. The film premiered Sept. 30, 2023 at the Chesapeake Film Festival and has been screened and discussed at numerous other festivals and venues.  In 2024, it will make its New England debut at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center, screen at the Environmental Film Festival and air on Maryland Public Television and other PBS stations.

In 2022, Dave Harp and I joined four teens and their team leaders on a grueling 17-mile expedition along the Cooper River in New Jersey organized by Upstream Alliance.  The goal of the film, Search for the Cooper, was to encourage the conservation and rebirth of a neglected waterway.  This award-winning film was screened at discussed at dozens of venues throughout the year.

Four teens hike, kayak and bushwhack their way along the forgotten and neglected Cooper River. Photo by Dave Harp

In 2021, Tom, Dave and I premiered Water’s Way, a film that looks at how water wants to flow and how humans have interfered with natural patterns.  Beaver ponds are one of the beneficent features of nature that have disappeared. Millions of beaver ponds and dams once sponsored a lush mosaic of wetlands throughout the Chesapeake region. These slowed and spread and retained water flowing to the Bay from every creek and river, letting it soak in and percolate through the ground. Because beavers have been gone so long. — they were trapped them out of the Chesapeake watershed by 1750 — there is almost an ecological amnesia as to the benefits they conferred, the world they created; how the watershed ‘thought’ for thousands of years.

Herbert the Beaver stars in Water's Way.  This film and other recent documentaries about the Chesapeake Bay watershed can be viewed at bayjournal.com/films. Photo by Dave Harp

Water’s Way had its world premiere at the Chesapeake Film Festival in 2021 and its DC premiere at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (DCEFF) in 2022.  It aired on Maryland Public television and was screened and discussed at numerous festivals and events.

In 2020, we released our film Saving San Domingo. The half-hour documentary is a tribute to one of the nation’s oldest, surviving African-American communities, San Domingo, MD.  To view, go to bayjournal.com/films.

What began as a chance discovery of the community by writer Tom Horton on a bike ride evolved into an intriguing, unique story about the descendants of Haitians who came to Maryland soon after the slave rebellion that freed slaves in Santo Domingo, the old name for the island that nows includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

In 2019, we completed two other films that screened in the Chesapeake Film Festival in October and were included in the DC Environmental Film Festival’s virtual festival. Both films (A Voice for the Rivers and Nassawango Legacy), along with our film about Smith Island (An Island Out of Time) aired on Maryland Public Television during Chesapeake Bay Week. All our films, and many of my previous films, are accessible via my Portfolio page.

To learn more about me and my work, please peruse this site. 

Sandy Cannon-Brown