News & Events

Ryerson University recently spent an evening with the celebrated team behind the Oscar-nominated animated short I Met the Walrus. The event featured a screening of the film and a discussion with the creative minds behind the short flick, Josh Raskin, Alex Kurina and Finlay Braithwaite. Raskin, director of the film, and Kurina, the illustrator, are alumni from the School of Image Arts. Braithwaite, a former School of Radio and Television Arts student, restored the original audio.

"Everything we do at Ryerson is about helping our students develop their creative abilities. So it is a source of real excitement to host an event like this and recognize the success of our alumni," said Don Snyder, Chair, School of Image Arts. "The screening created a real buzz here, and Josh, Alex and Finlay spoke directly and candidly to the students about their creative work and their experiences. The fact that it is possible to achieve what they have is an inspiration to us all."

Nominated for Best Animated Short Academy Award, 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.

"I kind of grew up with The Beatles . . . my parents were huge fans. So I was immediately drawn to the story," Raskin said. "I thought this recording was just an incredible artifact."

Raskin cut the recording down to five minutes and decided to "throw context out the window and not really worry about how Jerry got there or why." 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 teenage boy as he talked to the music legend.

"I was terrified with the idea of throwing out most of the recording," Raskin explained. "We really wanted to take John's words and visualize them the way they might appear in the head of this overwhelmed, baffled 14-year-old boy."

The three cohorts worked closely together to sift through Raskin's detailed animation script to decide what scenes should be hand drawn and which should be computer animated. Raskin mentioned that Lennon's drawings were a huge inspiration in choosing what the clips should look like.

"Part of the idea was picturing what these drawings would look like if they came to life and moved around," Raskin added.

Braithwaite gave Raskin a pat on the back for not having the "temptation to add any sound or music to it." The filmmaking duo affirm that the "foundation of the animation is just the sound" on the tape, with no superfluous noise tacked onto it. Raskin wanted to emphasize the beauty of the tape, which is the dialogue between this "naive, innocent kid and John Lennon."

"It's interesting to see a film like that and then hear the inspiration or thought-process behind it," said third-year Photography student Rekha Ramachandran. "It means something to have them come back to Ryerson and see how they've gone on to succeed.