By 1919, Katharine Hilliker (1885‒1965) had worked in journalism as a proofreader, society and motion picture editor, an associate editor in the Universal scenario department, an assistant producer and film editor for the Film Division of the U.S. Public Division of Information, a movie publicist, and, with the film The Lesson (1918, Select), had already begun her career as a successful title-writer.
Hilliker would go on to do even more, as well-documented in Kristen Hatch’s profile for the Women Film Pioneers Project. She seized upon opportunities to learn about motion pictures in the silent era, from graphic design to editing. In just over a decade from her start at Universal, Hilliker and her second husband H. H. Caldwell would exert a decisive creative influence, from pre-production and titling to final cut, on Lucky Star, 7th Heaven, and Sunrise at Fox.
As part of her immersion in film crafts, in just a few years (1918‒1920) Hilliker would edit and title over 50 short travelogues for producer  C. L. Chester’s “Chester Outing Scenics,” made for the sporting magazine Outing. The 1919 scenic, Up in the Air After Alligators, illustrates Hilliker’s panache with titles. An article by Alison Smith in the May 1920 issue of Photoplay, “Kidding Mother Nature,” lauds Hilliker for the way “she deliberately ‘jazzed’ her scenic sub-titles” with colloquial appeal, to set them apart from the conventional, purple-prosed descriptions of educational excursions. Alligators introduces us to “the modern sportsman,” a young man flying down to Palm Beach, who forsakes human company for “society scaly with age and tremendously snooty.” Giornate attendees may be particularly tickled – with the alligators  – by the demonstration of “one way of puttin’ em [the reptiles] to sleep.”
This film has been selected among Hilliker’s surviving scenics for its coruscating titles and change in point-of-view from the anonymous sportsman to the captured alligator, Fido. The accompanying feature Kentucky Pride uses titles anthropomorphically for horses, as Hilliker does here for alligators, exemplified by Fido’s parting shot: “it was a helluva world and no place for an alligator.” – Gabriel Paletz