Photo courtesy of NKPR Public Relations

An image from Josh Raskin's I Met The Walrus. The fve-minute animated short is about a 1969 interview with John Lennon, where he discusses political strife plaguing the world.

The most recent Ryerson alumnus to join the small list of those nominated for an Academy Award never actually got his degree.

Josh Raskin, 27, a former new media student, was working on his final-year project - a 45-minute film with an accompanying score - and quickly realized how daunting the task actually was.

"It ended up becoming a monster with a mind of its own very quickly," he said.

He recognized that in order to make the film properly, the only option was to drop all his courses, which is exactly what he did.

But not getting that piece of paper hasn't hindered Raskin in the slightest. When the Oscar nominations were announced on Jan. 22, Raskin's film, I Met The Walrus, was on the list for Best Animated Short Film.

Photo courtesy of Josh Raskin

Josh Raskin directed and animated I Met The Walrus, which has been shown at film festivals worldwide.

Raskin, who was at the Sundance Film Festival when the nominations were announced, did not believe the news when he received an early morning phone call from the illustrator of the film.

"The film's illustrator, James Braithwaite, gave me a call at 6:30 in the morning. He let me know that we'd been nominated. I didn't believe him at all, I thought he was playing a big trick on me," Raskin said.

"I think I used a great deal of swear words. . . . (But) the subsequent several calls in the next minute led me to believe that maybe he wasn't lying after all."

I Met The Walrus is a five-minute film based on a 1969 interview with former Beatle John Lennon that was conducted by then-14-year-old Jerry Levitan, now a Toronto-based lawyer and children's entertainer. Levitan snuck into the King Edward Hotel to get the interview. It illustrates Lennon's desire to find peace in a world riddled with conflict and political strife.

Levitan, who produced the film, said he was stuck on a hill in the middle of a snowstorm, attempting to drive his young daughter to school, when he got the nomination news.

I Met The Walrus premiered in Toronto in March 2007 after more than a year of hard work. Levitan had received many offers in the past to make the 40-minute tape-recorded interview into a film, but had always declined to do so - until Raskin came along.

"I was . . . looking for a young filmmaker who had intelligence and wit, because I thought finally I'm going to do (this) in a particular way, so I asked around, and met somebody who hooked me up with Josh. We met, I saw a film he had done, and his other work and I was immediately struck by his talent," said Levitan, who described working with Raskin as a "joy."

After Levitan asked him to work on the film, Raskin recalls immediately being fascinated by the John Lennon interview.

"What intrigued me most was the actual recorded interview. I listened to it and came back at (Levitan) with a pitch to cut it down to five minutes and animate directly to it," Raskin said.

His idea was a success, with the final product being shown at film festivals all over the world, and the film being described as everything from "a brilliant work of art" to "a visual narrative [that] tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multi-pronged animation."

Getting this "brilliant work of art" onto the big screen was no easy feat, Raskin said.

"It became such an intimate, personal project so quickly between myself and the genius illustrator James Braithwaite who worked on it, and the genius digital illustrator and designer Alex Kurina," Raskin said. "The three of us locked ourselves in a dark studio for a year to get the thing done."

Photo courtesy of NKPR Public Relations

Another still image from Josh Raskin's I Met The Walrus.

He also credits a lot of the film's success to Levitan.

"It was the dream director-producer relationship," Raskin said. "Basically he gave us complete carte blanche to do whatever we wanted to. He left us alone in the studio for months at a time, and he'd pop in every three or four months, look at a few seconds of footage, giggle like a schoolgirl and run out again, and just let us keep going.

"He gave us absolute freedom, which was incredible and I think extremely rare in the creative world."

Raskin's brother Jamie is not surprised that Levitan entrusted Josh with I Met The Walrus.

"He's the smartest person I know," Jamie said. "I mean that. Yes, he stamps on his own feet half the time, like most of us do, but he's incredibly intuitive, and creatively has tremendous confidence in his idea of what something needs to be.

"Plus, he looks like Elijah Wood," he added.

Josh Raskin's passion for what he does shines through at every moment.

"As incredibly flattering and overwhelming and unbelievable as it (being nominated) is, it's not the reason you make a film," he said. "And I think if it is the reason you make a film, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, and the film won't be very good. And that goes for any festival, or awards show, or accolade that you can get.

"You make a film because you love doing it and it's important to you."

Raskin next plans to turn I Met The Walrus into an illustrated book, telling the whole story beginning with how Levitan got into John Lennon's hotel room, and ending with a copy of the film.

In the meantime, Raskin is working on a record -- which is what he does when filmmaking isn't keeping him occupied - and writing a live-action feature that involves animation, but in a "bizarre, real-world context." He gives a lot of credit to Ryerson's new media program for allowing him to nurture his passions.

"(The program) seemed to be . . . open-ended and open-minded, and allowed me to focus on everything I was into, which ranged from music to film to animation," he said.

"What I wanted to get out of it I absolutely did. . . . I think it was the right thing to do."