Yellow Ball Workshop films

An influential and acclaimed animator, teacher and author, Yvonne Andersen (b.1932) followed a stalwart, if unconventional, path in the arts ever since receiving a full scholarship to Louisiana State University as a baritone horn player. She soon changed her major to art, studying design with Peter Kahn at LSU and later painting with Hans Hoffman in Provincetown, Massachusetts during the summer of 1953. It was in Provincetown where she met her husband, poet Dominic (Val) Falcone, and they opened the seminal Sun Gallery. From 1955 - 1959, they spent their summers away from New York City exhibiting the work of young artists and organizing "controversial" experimental film screenings, installations, performances and the first "happening" in the US. The unknown artist Charles Rogers Grooms—who Falcone nicknamed "Red"—had his first solo show; Alex Katz was a regular exhibitor; and Allan Kaprow appeared as a visiting artist before gaining artworld fame in the 60s for his spontaneous "un-art" which took place outside the institution. Andersen and Falcone continued the film screening programs after the Sun Gallery closed at the end of the 1959 season. Their annual Provincetown Film Study Group continued through the early sixties.

Excited by the avant garde and experimental films she screened, Andersen bought a used 16mm Bolex camera and taught herself the basics of filmmaking—beginning with documenting the world around her. Eventually, Andersen started cutting up and animating her own artwork and then made a film with Red Grooms, Spaghetti Trouble (1963)—animating cut-outs of his drawings using stop-motion. By 1960, Andersen and Falcone had closed the gallery and moved to Everett, Mass. with their two young children. The project-oriented Andersen welcomed eager neighborhood kids over to make art with her own children, and their passion fueled the birth of classes she called the Yellow Ball Workshop—partly in reference to the Sun Gallery. When Andersen showed her students one of her films, they wanted to make one themselves. The Workshop's first film project, The Amazing Colossal Man (1964), involved twelve children collaborating in its pixellated papier-mâché manifestation. Perhaps creating the first all-children-made films, the animation classes quickly took off and became the Workshop's focus. Andersen eventually expanded her offerings, teaching intensives at elementary schools and community centers, including Project Incorporated in Cambridge and the Newton Creative Arts Center. Students would learn every aspect of making a film from start to finish: creating special effects, operating 16mm cameras and light meters, editing the film and recording their own soundtracks.