“The light itself is a great piece of kit,” says Frazier. ![]() Since Colorspike is designed to work as either a standalone unit or part of a larger array, the pair are already working on mounting solutions for when the product ships next year, which will enable you to position multiple Colorspikes together in different configurations. But the fact that you just throw it in your bag and it’s so portable is really convenient, because you never have to go, ‘Do I need to lug this around or not?’ It just always comes with you.”Īn Expandable Lighting System With Countless Options So it will work its way in with your other lights at first, I think. And then, if you carry around some random little lights in case you wanted to do sirens or fire, those get replaced. “Maybe it’ll replace your gel wall to start. You can put Colorspike next to it and essentially gel your existing lights,” explains Frazier. “You might have your LED panel that’s white. It also gives you a lot more options on the fly. You can dial up whatever patterns or colors you need and do things more quickly. You don’t have to move from behind the camera. “Then we thought, wouldn’t it be great if, in addition to all those great effects with this really cool, robust system, we could also link multiple units together, to create a multi-point lighting system you can control from your phone without having to get up or swap anything out. ![]() “The initial idea was mainly as a video effects light,” adds McGuigan. There was this need to be able to be really flexible when I was shooting, and Colorspike was designed to answer a lot of the questions that I personally had as shooter, that we feel a lot of shooters do.” “Colorspike is absolutely from that world, where Monday I’m shooting tabletop, Tuesday I’m on location, and Wednesday I’m shooting still product shots. “Having shot photography and footage for so long, I already had this thought that it would have been nice if I had this or that piece of gear when I was working,” says Frazier. The Power of Flexibility Plus Portability Everybody can access every level of the functionality without running into any problems.” We approached the design that way - that it’s full featured, but it’s not confusing. So one of the most important things for us right off the bat was, there’s no point in doing any of this if we can’t make an app that makes this easy to use as a system. “And in almost every case, the app was just terrible. ![]() “We looked at a lot of lights that were Bluetooth-connected and our first big takeaway was that they all had an app,” says Frazier. Don’t make any assumptions that things are always going to work the way you expect them to when it’s time to put something together in a factory.” “Keep it simple, make sure it feels good, solid quality. “In terms of the industrial design for Colorspike, we took a lot of lessons from Pixelstick to avoid taking risks on things that can fail in mass production,” explains McGuigan. Having two successful launches under their belts, Frazier and McGuigan may not have started out with product-design expertise, but they certainly have it now. ![]() We’re seeing a lot of people who do movies and video come in for a Colorspike, because we designed it to be able to be in their kit bag for essentially any situation.” We’re bringing in all of the video world now, whereas Pixelstick is still-only. “It’s for film, it’s for video, it’s for still, it’s for tabletop, it’s for location,” says Frazier. Colorspike has been in development for two years now, and where Pixelstick was a tool to dazzle people with unique and whimsical results, this time the goal was for something much more practical. That’s how we laid down the groundwork of doing our own electronics, and then writing software for them.”Īfter launching their sleep mask in 2012, the duo found enough success to go straight to work on Pixelstick, which launched late the following year to major success. “Most of it came from Duncan building equipment for his photography freelance business, sliders, and spinners and stuff like that. “Both of us had a strong computer-science background, but neither of us had any product design experience or anything like that,” reveals McGuigan. And from that, we pushed into the actual product design.” “Once I started doing that kind of stuff, we were like, ‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ We could build essentially anything we want, given enough time. “I would say it’s very much because I was shooting stock that Bitbanger started, because I was starting to build timelapse rigs myself to try and get new shots,” explains Frazier.
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