Space Off

by Tommaso Ragnisco

 

Space Off is a short film born out of a deep, unexpected and rare friendship.

In 1990, at the sound stages of SBP, a television post-production company where I spent time after graduating from art school, a new interactive motion-control system had just been acquired—more specifically, a rostrum camera—and Corrado Vecchi, with whom I had recently become friends, was the person in charge of operating it. It was a wonderful piece of equipment, capable of creating effects I had previously seen only in the occasional photograph in specialist visual-effects magazines. When it started moving, the sound of its motors was like a song.

It was in this new and exciting environment that Corrado introduced me to Tino Franco. Nothing else needed to be said: our game together had already begun.

Over the following years, until 1995, when Cristina Croce and I founded the design studio 21st Century Design, Tino and I chased ideas and projects together.

I was about to graduate in Industrial Design from ISIA in Rome with a project for a spacecraft designed for film. My thesis focused on the role of the designer in the film industry—certainly a new field for that kind of course at the time.

For my thesis I had built a model of the spacecraft, and I remember clearly the day Tino and I decided to use it to make a science-fiction short film. After all, that was probably the real reason I had built it in the first place: TO PLAY WITH MY FRIEND.

And because, once you start playing, the whole thing rises like whipped cream, Tino said to me: “You’ve built the outside of the spaceship. Now you have to build the inside.”

I love it when someone raises the stakes.

And so our project began to take shape. There was nothing we would rather have been doing

Tino cleared out an old warehouse on Via della Pisana in Rome, where he built a large chroma-key backdrop. For us, it immediately became our own little “Méliès theatre”—a space where we were free to create

While I designed and built everything we needed for the film, with the invaluable help of friends who became just as involved in the project, Tino organised the production, bringing together crew and actors. Everyone contributed their own skills, driven by the simple desire to turn a shared dream into something real.

Space Off became a successful short film, receiving awards and reaching important milestones.

It achieved a great deal, and gave just as much back to everyone who took part in it.

In short, it did everything we thought it was meant to do for our careers and for the things we loved. But it also did much more: it showed us, quite clearly, that Friendship is what truly gives things meaning, and that only through this wonderful and rare dance can we experience that sense of fullness in the soul.

Time has passed now, and Tino has already completed his journey on Earth. Much like the spacecraft I designed for my graduation project—a chronomorphic spacecraft that changes with the passing of time, reminding us of its value, and of the greater awareness we ought to have as we travel through it.

 

Tommaso Ragnisco

 

Rome, 18 January 2026