"n 1969, a 14–year–old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel–to–reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon's "bed–in" phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries traditional pen sketches by James Braithwaite with digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell–binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message."
(Josh Raskin)
Fig.1 'I Met The Walrus' (2007). Josh Raskin – Animator, Josh Raskin – Director, Josh Raskin – Editor, Josh Raskin – Composer (Music Score), Alex Kurina – Cinematographer, James Braithwaite Computer Illustrations – Cinematographer, Jerry Levitan – Producer, Josh Raskin – Screenwriter, James Braithwaite – Illustrator, Alex Kurina – Illustrator [6 minutes].
"This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Radiophonic Workshop, the BBC's experimental unit for electronic sound. It also marks the 10th anniversary of the workshop's death after a long period of decline. But almost as soon it was gone, it began to assume cult status. A Radiophonic ghost began to haunt the peripheries of pop culture, audible initially as an influence on 'retrofuturist' groups such as Boards of Canada, Broadcast and Add N to (X). In the past five years, there has been a steady flow of Radiophonic–related reissues from labels such as Mute, Rephlex, Glo–Spot and Trunk; a BBC4 documentary, Alchemists of Sound; and a South Bank symposium organised by Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley. There have been two plays about the workshop's Delia Derbyshire, and when Doctor Who was relaunched in 2005, unfavourable comparisons were made between the Radiophonic team's original electronic music and the orchestrated flatus of Murray Gold's updated version. This summer, the Southbank Centre held a symposium on Daphne Oram, the workshop's co–founder, and there was news about the discovery of a huge cache of unreleased material by Derbyshire, the workshop's most brilliant composer. In November, Mute is set to issue a double CD compilation, 50th Anniversary Retrospective, including nuggets never before released."
(Simon Reynolds, 20 September 2008)
The Alchemists of Sound (TV 2003) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963155/].