Scratch and Crow

Helen Hill (May 9, 1970 – January 4, 2007) was an experimental animator, filmmaker, educator, artist, writer, and social activist who lived in New Orleans, Louisiana. A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Hill began creating short animated super-8 films at age eleven. She earned her B.S. at Harvard University in 1992. While majoring in English, she also minored in Visual and Environmental Studies, where she made the 16mm animated short Rain Dance as well as two other animated films. After receiving an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Experimental Animation, Helen, along with her husband Paul Gailiunas, spent time in Canada, where she continued to create films and teach film animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) and at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (AFCOOP), before moving to New Orleans. Her short films, including Bohemian Town (2004), Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century (2001), and Mouseholes (1999), have been screened at festivals all over the world and feature puppets, hand drawn animation, found footage, and original hand-processed film. She is also the author of a book called Recipes for Disaster, which is a compilation of filmmaker’s techniques for hand processing film.

Tragically, Helen Hill was murdered by a random intruder in her New Orleans home in the early morning of January 4, 2007, one of six murders in New Orleans in a single 24-hour period. —Harvard Film Archive