THE FILM TEAM
Tom Horton, Sandy Cannon-Brown, and Dave Harp merged their talents in 2015 to produce Beautiful Swimmers Revisited, an hour-long documentary film inspired by William W. Warner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay.
Their second film, High Tide in Dorchester, focuses on the effects of climate change and sea level rise in the Bay’s most vulnerable county. Dorchester County, now Maryland’s 4th largest county by land mass, is doomed to be the 14th largest in this century.
The trio’s third collaboration, An Island Out of Time, is both celebration and elegy for a place beset with rising sea levels and erosion, pollution and harvest restrictions, and young people seeking opportunities older generations of islanders never dreamed of—all this seen through the lens of the Marshall family of Smith Island.
Nassawango Legacy looks at one family’s multi-generational efforts to protect a Chesapeake Bay stream and The Nature Conservancy’s work to assure that it continues to flourish as an 11,000-acre preserve.
Saving San Domingo is a departure from their environmental films to share the history and culture, history and present of a remarkable, but unknown, community and a family trying to preserve its identity and traditions.
The team’s new film, Thinking Like a Watershed, recognizes how the Chesapeake Bay watershed “thought”, how it shed water, and by understanding that we can make modest gains in Chesapeake Bay restoration.
Tom Horton
Tom Horton covered the environment for The Baltimore Sun for 35 years. He has written eight books about the Chesapeake Bay. His honors include the John Burroughs Award for the best book of nature writing, the David Brower award from the Sierra Club, and other awards from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Audubon Society. Governor Martin O’Malley honored Horton as an Admiral of the Chesapeake. He currently is a Professor of Practice in Environmental Studies at Salisbury University and a contributing writer and columnist for the Bay Journal.
Sandy Cannon-Brown
Sandy Cannon-Brown, founder (1985) and president (1985-present) of VideoTakes, Inc., is an award-winning environmental filmmaker whose work has taken her to Central and South America, West Africa, the Northern Great Plains of Montana, and the Everglades. She was an associate director for the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University, honored as CEF’s first senior scholar in 2013 and named AU’s adjunct professor of the year in 2011. Among her many honors, Women In Film & Video DC honored Cannon-Brown as a Woman of Vision in 1998. She served as WIFV’s president 2011-12. She recently moved to Martha’s Vineyard, but remains VP of the Chesapeake Film Festival and a producer and editor of the films created by the team of Horton, Harp and Cannon-Brown.
David Harp
David Harp has published five books of photography on the Bay with essays by Tom Horton. His stunning photography has graced the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Audubon, Sierra, Natural History, Islands, Travel Holiday, and Coastal Living Magazine. He was the staff photographer for the Hagerstown Morning Herald and the photographer for The Baltimore Sun Magazine during the 1980’s. He is currently the photographer for the Bay Journal. He was awarded the Andrew White Medal by Loyola College of Maryland in 2004 and is past president of the American Society of Media Photographers. In 2020, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum honored Dave with a year-long retrospective of his photography.
VideoTakes 