Who I am
My name is Riccardo Mollame, I was born in Rome and I am an electronic engineer working as designer of enterprise web applications and database systems for an IT american company.When I was a child I used to spend hours drawing and working with plasticine: later on, passion for comics (Spiderman, Fantastic Four and so on) and Japanese Super Robots cartoons pushed me to further improve drawing techniques. University years slowly extinguished my will to practice this invaluable and irreplaceable way of expression: when I was resigned to have definitely lost the magic, 3D graphics came along to relight a fire that was only sleeping underneath the ashes...
My interest into CG has a composite, stop-and-go history. As probably for thousands of people, the first introduction to 3D imagery and animation came from the milestone movie Tron which literally disclosed the vision of an immense world to everyone searching new ways of expression. At that time I hardly knew the existence of computers and those astounding images, neither cartoons nor reality, appeared to me as sent from another planet.
Several years later, it was the turn of Terminator 2 (up to today unparalleled to me in as far as taste, effectiveness and intelligence in use of digital SFX is concerned) to show the way. I was already involved in computers since a couple of years, despite for academic reasons only, and I could somehow appreciate the huge amount of technology, in terms of software and hardware, employed in producing such fantastic scenes: my feelings about CG still led me to consider this discipline as doomed to remain definitely out of reach.
My first direct but still "platonic" contact with Computer Graphics took place at the end of 1995 when I happened to buy a copy of a magazine specialized on the matter. The pages of that issue were crowded of astonishing pictures whose caption excited me claiming that everything I was seeing was produced with hardware and software (nearly) affordable to bare mortals: I felt like the beggar face to the grocery showcase during Christmas but nevertheless Computer Graphics got out from a limbo to my eyes and became a matter of everyday life (despite I kept on staring at it from a long, long distance).
At last, I approached active 3D modeling during Christmas of 1996 when I decided that that was the time I'd put my hands on my favorite 3D software: I still can recall each minute of the afternoon I went buying it. I spent days and days closed in my room travelling without baggage, with a no-stop of Style Council, Cardigans and Cocteau Twins songs as background.
And it still goes on.