Welcome to VideoTakes, Inc., my site for the work I do as an independent filmmaker. My most recent project, in partnership with writer Tom Horton and photographer Dave Harp, is 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