When he arrived at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1967, Frank Mouris found that more than half of his small cohort of graphic design students also had an interest in film. Led by Alvin Eisenman, their “Machiavellian graphic design chairman … [with] far-reaching ambitions,” and Prof. Irving Kriesberg, a Painting department instructor with animation experience, Mouris and his classmates were assigned the following project: shoot one roll of 16mm Kodachrome II color film in half a day without any post-production editing or sound. Quick Dream (1968) is the result of this first assignment. Using a homemade animation stand in the university’s Chemistry department, Mouris created, as he describes it, “...a series of visual experiments with magazine photograph cutouts that make moving collages; coloraid paper; Avery labels; whatever I could think of that might animate. It became the seedbed for everything that followed,” most notably the Academy Award-winning Frank Film (1974).

Thanks to a 2015 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the Yale Film Archive preserved Mouris's first three films: Quick Dream (1967), You're Not Real Pretty But You're Mine... (1968), and Chemical Architecture (1968), co-directed with Mouris’s classmate Peter Schlaifer. Subsequently, the YFA preserved Coney Island Eats (1967), also co-directed with Schlaifer, and Impasse (1978), which he and Caroline Mouris made with millions of Avery labels, while living in Los Angeles where Frank attended the AFI.