Born in Iran, and immigrating to Cananda in early childhood, Rak Tafarodi grew up

in Toronto, Vancouver, and Waterloo, Ont.   His training is in the Fine Arts, graduating from the Ontario

the Ontario College of Art in 1984, with a specialization in sculpture.   He worked as a artist in Toronto

for the next eleven years.   During that time his sculptural skills brought led him to work in various fields

including decorative plaster casting, prototype making, giftware manufacturing, and costume making.   He

also worked in the film/tv business through prop-making, special FX, and make-up prosthetics. Productions

he was involved in include "Captain Powers", "Twilight Zone", and "Maniac Mansions".                             


In 1994 he entered the Computer Animation program at Sheridan College, where he won the CityTV 1995

scholarship prize.      During the spring of 1995 Rak moved to Vancouver to work on "ReBoot!" with the

company that was to become Mainframe Entertainment.  After animating for a season and a half on ReBoot

and Beast Wars, his experience as a sculptor came to the fore when he helped Mainframe form a Modeling

Department.   Becoming a Modeling Supervisor, he helped organize the high volume production of models

for many seasons of various television shows, including  ReBoot (season 3),  Beast Wars,  War Planets,

Weirdos, Beast Machines, Action Mann, and MTV's Spiderman. In this time he became very experienced

in the creation of production-friendly computer models, especially characters, for computer animation.  


In 2003 Rak decided to move on to feature film computer animation projects, and returned to Toronto to

work on the film, "The Wild".  Since then he has moved from project to project, in Toronto, Los Angeles,

and Vancouver, working as a character modeler on such films as "Space Chimps",  "Escape From Planet Earth",

and currently, "Gnomeo and Juliet".                                                                                                        


Currently, he lives in Toronto, working as a computer modeling artist, and maintaining his interest in sculpture

and photography.                                                                                                                                    




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