Birthday:
January 1
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individual human (me)
First Name (Required: even if you are representing an organization you must use your name)
Chris(Topher)
Last Name (Family Name)
Maraffi
About Me (human/individual)/interests, work..short bio/ THis is the most important. It is the only way to know that you are not a SPAMBOT!Be generous!
My full name is Christopher Maraffi, but I go by Topher. I’m a performance artist, technical animator, educator, and author. For many years I lectured on the topic of 3D character creation and have written three popular books on the subject that are on Disney's suggested reading list. I’m also a social dance instructor, and one of the principal developers of Swango (Swing + Tango @ www.swangoblues.com ) fusion style of social dance. My UCSC Digital Arts & New Media MFA research, Mimesis & Mocap, is a cross-disciplinary performance study in creating believable real-time interaction between human performers and 3D characters within a theatrical environment. My two performances, The Avatar Dance and The Magic Mirror Game, envision future methods of re-creating classic dance and pantomime movements with a digital double. In the fall 2010 I will start as a PhD student in the UCSC Computer Science program, continuing my collaboration with Theater Arts, to develop expressive and improvisational real-time synthespians. I will be a member of the Computational Cinematics group, which is part of the Expressive Intelligence Studio (EIS). My artistic intent is to fuse theatrical, cinematic, and gaming techniques (such as live dance-acting, digital puppetry, performance capture, and expressive processing) into a new medium of performative entertainment, which I call The Theatre of the Avatar.
