Space Off

by Tommaso Ragnisco

 

Space Off is a short film born out of a profound friendship.

 

In 1990, at the SBP sound stages, a television post-production company I used to spend time at after graduating from art school, they had just acquired an Interactive Motion Control system, more specifically a Rostrum Camera. Corrado Vecchi, whom I met during that experience, was the person in charge of operating it.

It was an extraordinary piece of equipment, capable of creating effects I had previously seen only in the occasional photograph in specialist visual-effects magazines. When it sprang into action, the sound of its motors was like a song...

 

It was in that 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, up until 1995, when Cristina Croce and I founded the design studio 21st Century Design, we 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 cinema. My thesis focused on the role of the designer within the film industry—certainly a new field of exploration for that kind of course at the time.

For my thesis, I had built a model of the spacecraft, and I remember perfectly 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 play, once you get into it, 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.

 

That was how our project began to take shape. There was simply nothing better we could have been doing.

Tino cleared out an old warehouse in Via della Pisana, where he built a large chroma-key backdrop. To us, it immediately became our own little “Méliès Theatre”: a free space in which to create.

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

 

Space Off went on to become a successful short film, earning recognition and reaching important milestones. It achieved a great deal, and it gave just as much back to everyone who took part in it.

In short, it did what we thought it was meant to do for our profession and for the work we loved—but it also did much more.

It showed us, quite clearly, that friendship is what truly gives meaning to it all; that only through this wonderful and rare dance can we experience that profound sense of fulfilment of the soul.

 

Now time has passed, and Tino has already completed his journey on this earth.

 Like the spacecraft from my graduation thesis, a chronomorphic spaceship that changes with the passing of time, it reminds us of the value of time itself, and of how much greater our awareness of it should be as we travel through it.

 

Tommaso Ragnisco

Rome, 18 January 2026