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Ryerson University alumnus Josh Raskin struck gold with his first professional film - an Academy Award nomination for best animated short.
It was only three years ago that Raskin was working night and day on his fourth-year thesis project in the New Media option at Ryerson's School of Image Arts. But I Met The Walrus, a six-minute film that has garnered awards around the world, earned him a trip to the red carpet. Though he didn't win the Academy Award, Raskin said the nomination was "unexpected and mindblowing."

Ryerson President Sheldon Levy called Raskin at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah to congratulate him. Raskin says he was "very surprised and very flattered" by the President's call.

The Ryerson connection on the film extends beyond Raskin. Fellow School of Image Arts alumnus Alex Kurina built all the digital elements for the film, and Ryerson School of Radio and Television Arts instructor and alum Finlay Braithwaite restored the audio. The remarkable pen illustration work was done by James Braithwaite, Finlay's brother.

I Met The Walrus uses audio from a legendary encounter between John Lennon and a 14-year-old Toronto boy, Jerry Levitan, at the King Edward Hotel. Beatles' fan Levitan skipped school and talked his way into the suite of Yoko Ono and Lennon during one of their brief stopovers in Toronto. Levitan captured the 40-minute interview with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and resisted numerous offers over the years to make a program from the recording until he found the right opportunity.

Levitan, now a lawyer, was shown some of Raskin's Ryerson work by a mutual friend and Raskin proposed the notion of setting a segment of the audio interview to line-drawn animation, resembling the thoughts of a 14-year-old boy as he talked to the music legend.

"The pitch was effortless. Jerry handed over the (audio) recording and said 'do what you will with it,'" Raskin said. More than a year and thousands of individual drawings later, the film debuted in May, 2007.

"It's a visual interpretation of the sound recording and nothing more," Raskin says. The film has a "hand-made" look because "doing work with the lowest technology possible is the way I like it. Our studio was a piece of bristol board and a desk lamp."

Raskin says he has been very much inspired by Ryerson faculty members Ed Slopek and Kathleen Pirrie-Adams. And he has fond memories of pop culture classes by Hugh Innis.

Ryerson's New Media option in the School of Image Arts was a "perfect fit" for Raskin's interests of combining music, animation and film and exploring his creative inspiration, he said.