Brochure from The Provincetown Art Association and Museum's 1981 retrospective of The Sun Gallery.

The first film finished was Spaghetti Trouble, made together with Red Grooms in 1963, and still in distribution by the Filmmaker's Co-op in New York. From then on, she and Dominic went on to make many more films--several in collaboration with Red Grooms, including Fat Feet, Meow, Meow and Appolinaire Unexpected. Independently, and in collaboration, Yvonne has produced more than nine shorts, films, most recently We Will Live Forever, an animated illustration of a poem by Dominic Falcone.

Yellow Ball Workshop: Accidental Beginnings
By 1960, Yvonne and Dominic had closed the gallery and were raising their two children, Jean and Paul Falcone, in Everett, Massachusetts. Thinking back to the beginnings of her teaching activities, Yvonne recalls a seemingly unrelated incident. "We had moved into a new apartment, and we had to get some furniture for it. My mother-in-law knew this guy who tore down old buildings and schools, so we went to get some used furniture. They had all these little children's chairs, they were exquisite, and only 50 cents each. So I bought 8 of them, took them home, and put them around the work table." Andersen had always provided plenty of art supplies for her own children, who often had friends over to make art projects. Soon enough, children were coming to the house, asking to come in and play, even when her own children weren't home. "The next thing I knew, there were always little people sitting in those little chairs, using up my art supplies!" recalls Andersen. "They were doing very good work, so I decided I might as well get it organized." So, in 1963, the Yellow Ball Workshop was born when Yvonne began offering art classes in her home, for two hours every Saturday, charging each child only one dollar per lesson to cover the cost of supplies.

The evolution of the art classes into animation workshops was not something that Yvonne had planned. "One day, I showed the students the film that Red and I had made, and they wanted to make a film, too." she recalls. "One of the boys had lots of good ideas, but he never really made anything. So I said 'Well, you write a script and we'll do it.' The next week the boy came in with a script. So there I was, I was stuck, we had to do it!" The first film they made was The Amazing Colossal Man, a group project with papier-mâché characters shot in stop-motion on 16mm film.

Word spread about the animation workshops, and the class size tripled from 12 to 36. Yellow Ball films were screened with acclaim at universities and festivals, a compilation of them winning first prize at the Rhode Island Film Festival. The $300. in prize money enabled Yvonne to pay off the film lab bills that had added up.

Andersen's book published by Little, Brown in 1991.

In The Public Eye
Before long, people were beginning to notice her and she was being approached in all directions. "I didn't know it at the time, but apparently nobody had done this before," Yvonne said, recalling the overwhelming attention that ensued. Schools and educational institutions began purchasing and renting the children's films. She appeared as a guest on the Mike Douglas Show and the Today show, and in 1970, she produced a 13 minute documentary for CBS television called Let's Make a Film. That same year, Yvonne was approached by two different publishers to write instructional books about animation, resulting in the publication of Make Your Own Animated Movies, written for children, and Teaching Film Animation to Children, done for adults. From 1973-77, Yvonne wrote a regular column on animation techniques for Super-8 Filmmaker Magazine.

All of this attention even led to commercial projects for Yvonne and her students, bringing in some money to finance the film, supplies and accumulating lab bills. Such kid-produced films that came out of Yellow Ball include four "peacock logo" spots for NBC, test commercials for Cheetos snacks, an educational series for Westinghouse, vignettes for the children's show, Hot Dog, and opening films for the White House conference on children.