The Dancing Bulrushes[1] is a 1985 5-minute 16mm short animated film by Joanna Priestley,[2] and Steven Subotnick using sand on top glass, directly under the camera.
Directors Joanna Priestley and Steven Subotnick made The Dancing Bulrushes in 1984 and 1985, when they were MFA students in the Experimental Animation Department at California Institute of the Arts.
They decided to do a film using sand animation and found an Ojibwa Native American story about Coyote in a book by Barry Lopez when they were researching narrative possibilities.
Priestley and Subotnick drove to Santa Barbara to collect beach sand, which needed filtering to remove cigarette butts and other debris.
The Dancing Bulrushes was written by Barry Lopez and is featured in his book Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America.