Presently she makes her home in Nashville, Tennessee,
which she describes as the “third coast” for film production.
There the production facilities, equipment, and moving
picture professionals are abundant, comparing more than
favorably with those in New York and Los Angeles. She has
produced and directed four documentaries for the Kiawah
Conservancy including the original “Legacy of Kiawah” in
1996 and several derivative pieces from that award-winning
program. In 1997, she produced the original “The Magic of
Kiawah” followed by “Our Legacy for Kiawah” (2013) along
with a new, updated version of “The Magic of Kiawah.”
The fabulous loggerhead turtle film presented in November
2015 followed. She has completed filming a documentary
on alligators that will be presented October 27, 2016, at
the Sandcastle (see page 44 for ticket information) and is
currently working on her latest Kiawah film featuring our
incredible birds and focusing on the magical journey of the
red knots that will be shown in October of 2017.
When Cindy was preparing to produce the loggerhead film
she planned her trip to Kiawah for mid-July, a time when she
would have a chance to capture images of both nesting and
hatching turtles during the same project session. Of course,
nesting usually occurs in the early morning hours and she
would have to find a female turtle crawling up somewhere on
Kiawah’s 10 miles of ocean front without the aid of any lights
in the darkest hours of the night. All of these challenges aside,
she knew she would get her footage of a nesting female.
She approached the task with confidence, certain it would
happen on one of the three nights she and her crew were
waiting onshore. On their first night they had the assistance
of Charlotte Hope from the South Carolina Department of
Natural Resources, who traveled up and down the length of
the beach in the dark on a small ATV looking for a dunebound turtle.
The group on the beach was just about to pack up their
equipment and head in when Charlotte called at 1:45 a.m.
to say a mother turtle was on her way up. Cindy mobilized
and captured every moment from the crawl up to digging the
nest to laying dozens of eggs to the retreat back to the ocean,
all of it lit by a full moon. The turtle’s tears were not the only
ones on the beach at Kiawah that night. The next morning
she and her crew filmed a nest evaluation with the turtle
patrol during which 26 hatchlings appeared and marched to
the sea with Cindy and her cameraman right behind them
21