The Journey from Spirit Lighting to Copper Candle: A 20-Year Adventure

Today is the 20th anniversary of me founding my company. It has been a long but exciting journey to get to where we are now and to celebrate this achievement I wanted to reflect on all of the moments and people that helped to make it happen.

The Birth of Spirit Lighting

The company was founded as Spirit Lighting, but we re-launched it in 2020 as Copper Candle, a new brand with a new purpose. The origins of Spirit Lighting, back in 2002, stem from my A-Level Design Technology project to build an LED stage light. At the time, there was nothing on the market like it, and my innovation came from my awareness of emerging high-intensity LED chips being used in architectural lighting.

The name Spirit Lighting actually came from my love of fantasy and RPG. I was on holiday with my family when I was 17 at Lake Osao in Tuscany. I distinctly remember driving around the lake on the way to dinner after several weeks of wracking my brains for an ideal company name (as any 17-year-old with a dream would do). I kept coming up with all sorts of names that felt clever. At the time, I was reading the epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time (now an Amazon Prime TV series), and I was reflecting on the five types of magic based on the four main elements of fire, water, air, and earth, and this curious fifth one the author called “Spirit.” I loved the idea that there was something else out there we couldn’t explain or see that threaded the world we live in together. Spirit stuck as the name for the business when it was registered on August 3, 2004.

Protecting the Invention

The idea behind the company was to protect my invention as I took my A-level project through industrial development and eventually into the market. Despite my age and the fact that no one else was doing something like this, I dreamt of the success I wanted for this company and, ultimately, the dream of leading a business to do something exciting and new. While the story eventually moved on from LED lighting products, this was an important start to the journey, bringing something completely new and unknown to an established industry – an experience I learned a lot from.

Lydia: The First Product

The product, which I called “Lydia” (linear lydia, it was going to be a brand to use mumsy names to describe the lights), went through a couple of iterations of industrial design, which my parents seeded for me. We got the product to a marketable version, and it was the first high-intensity LED flood built for theatre and live entertainment. Even now, 20 years on, it has features that other manufacturers haven’t accomplished. It was 100% solid state, so it had absolutely no moving parts like fans, meaning it didn’t produce any noise. It used six different LED chip colors, including a super-saturated blue, allowing us to create the range of colors that theatre lighting designers needed. It would be another seven or eight years before other manufacturers started to introduce multiple chips into their products.

We even started a process of patenting a clever idea for creating a profile lighting fixture using LEDs. At the time, a single LED source was almost impossible to make with any significant intensity to be used in a fixture that relies on a point source for the lens to focus. We stopped the patenting process when we realized that other manufacturers were finding other solutions to the single chip source, but our idea is still novel and would have built a super-powerful profile luminaire that is 100% solid state.

Early Achievements

All of this was achieved before my 21st birthday, and I was still a lighting design student at Rose Bruford College. That year, I took the product we had built to Plasa and entered it into the innovation awards. We were so far ahead of our time, it was the only LED product to be entered (the first ever, in fact), and it was completely ignored by the judges who saw it as a bit of an odd idea to use LEDs on stage – it would never catch on.

The first success for Lydia came when we made our first sale to have them installed in the newly refurbished Millennium Dome, which had been converted into the O2. In the area that now houses the cinema entrance, we product tested and installed a dozen Lydia fixtures, which were the only long-life color-changing floodlights with that much power on the market. We had completely found our niche and were looking forward to a successful life as a theatrical lighting product manufacturer.

A Period of Transition

At 21, it was a massive learning experience, and I discovered a lot about myself. It was also a period when lots of other things were going on. The recession had started, I was in love and wanted to buy a house with my girlfriend, who eventually became my wife, and it became time to find a job. I didn’t feel like the dream had died, but practicality took over, and I focused on a salaried job while watching from the sidelines as more established manufacturers overtook and eventually secured the market that Spirit Lighting would have been first to occupy.

A Decade of Growth

Fast forward 10 years, and life had seen me get married, have our first child, move to a bigger house, complete my master’s degree (with distinction!), and live a new dream in the most amazing job as Head of Visualisation at the Royal Opera House. I was also very involved in the military, working part-time outside of my normal job in the reserves as an analyst, and getting involved in some of the most interesting political conflicts where I was given roles that seemed like something out of a film. The thought of running a company was complete madness to me because I was at the top of my game and working with amazing people.

The Turning Point

But a couple of things started to happen. My reputation for being an expert in lighting visualisation was coinciding with a number of lighting designers I knew who wanted me to support them on their upcoming West End productions. Very quickly, I found that I was working on productions like Miss Saigon, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the Commonwealth Games Opening and Closing Ceremonies in Glasgow. It made me realise that there was a lot more to be had from the world outside the ROH.

The VR Revolution

This also coincided with an exciting new technology that came off the back of a Kickstarter project by the now-famous Palmer Luckey. As soon as VR became a thing, I imagined how I could use it for visualisation of our productions at the ROH. I waited for the HTC Vive to launch before purchasing one and downloaded Unity for the first time to run it. Our second son had just been born, and I spent my entire paternity leave learning how to use it so I could see 3D models of our scenery in VR.

I took the kit into the ROH to start showing directors and designers who found it fascinating. I remember The Third Floor, the leading pre-visualisation studio for film and games, came to visit us with their own kit to show us what they made, and I thought, “That’s exactly like what I built by myself in my evenings, and they are asking people to buy this! Why aren’t I doing it too?”

Embracing Augmented Reality

As soon as the Hololens was released in the UK, I was straight onto it. I had to apply for funding through an internal “Dragons' Den” that the ROH cleverly decided to run. In the pitch, I was just looking for the funding to pay for the Hololens, which was too much for my department’s budget. They turned around and said, “Here is the £3,500 for the Hololens, and here is another £10k for paying a development company to help you build it.” Through a competitive process, we eventually awarded a contract to Figment Productions, who would go on to become a company we would have many more professional relationships with, both at Copper Candle and the ROH.

Collaborating with Figment Productions

The main piece of development Figment Productions needed to do for us was to create a DMX integration into Unity that would allow a lighting control system to operate the 3D scenery in the augmented reality display. We were really pleased with their work, and it was exciting to work with them, but I couldn’t help the itch to do it myself. This collaboration led to the creation of The Current Rising, an immersive VR opera experience.

Entering the Competition

At the same time, Unity and Hololens were opening a competition to develop a new application that had to be deployed to the Microsoft App Store. The top 10 shortlisted companies would be awarded a Hololens to use for development, and the first prize was $100k. The problem was, I had never done any development on this scale in Unity. I still hadn’t built anything on the Hololens and had never published a shipped product. I applied anyway and was shortlisted. The US-style contract of agreement was terrifying, stating that I must deliver an app and that I was now bound by the terms of the competition.

The Intense Learning Experience

I had six weeks to build the AR visualisation tool with nothing but a Hololens, a PC, and a lot of YouTube videos. What eventually got published worked, and that’s being generous to it—it wasn’t the most exciting application and was very limited. Needless to say, I didn’t win the $100k, but I was given a special mention, which makes me think that I managed to do okay. When you think that I went from zero to hero in that short space of time, it was the most intense learning experience of my life. And now I had a bug for building things in VR and AR! The world had just been unlocked to me by having this new set of skills released. I wanted more!

Starting the PhD Journey

So, I started a PhD! It's something I’m still trying to finish to this day, but I wanted more opportunities to push myself to develop new tools and ideas, and this was the best way I could think to do it. It has been a journey I have loved and would recommend to anyone, but the ROH wasn’t so supportive. They didn’t think it aligned and wouldn’t give me any formal support. My bi-weekly mentoring chats with Mark Dakin were my encouragement to find something else to do with these skills. With his support and blessing, I applied for a fellowship with Magic Leap and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The fellowship was designed to sit across the Audience of the Future project, which the RSC was funded to deliver for Innovate UK. I would have the opportunity to work with this enigma of a company, Magic Leap, who were developing the most interesting new AR technology coming to market.

A Life-Changing Fellowship

Getting into this fellowship was life-changing because it allowed me to develop a business plan that would eventually become Copper Candle. I promised myself that I wouldn’t spend longer than 10 years in any job, and I started my sabbatical from the ROH 9 years and 11 months from my start date. During the fellowship, I was introduced to amazing people who inspired me with the vision to create entertainment using spatial media. These people were the top of the gaming industry, the lead creatives for games like Assassin's Creed, World of Warcraft, and Halo. What they also showed me was how to embrace your own passions in your work, by being yourself and using your superpowers to make you brilliant at your job.

Taking the Entrepreneurial Plunge

As the fellowship ended, it was time to take the plunge and make being an entrepreneur a full-time job. I formally quit my job at the ROH at the same time as the RSC contract ended. Shortly afterwards, the global pandemic made this feel like a costly decision, leaving me wondering if I had made the right move. I was very fortunate that Rose Bruford College, with whom I had been working to develop new courses in digital and virtual theatre, offered to keep me on a permanent contract. This meant that I could continue to do R&D and prepare the next generation of creative technologists.

Pivoting During the Pandemic

Not wanting the dream of entrepreneurship to end, I made a desperate attempt to move the business into supporting theatres that wanted to conduct remote performances. I applied for and won funding from Innovate UK to develop Break A Leg, a virtual theatre performance platform that allowed amateur performers to continue to perform at home in isolation via an online portal and a phone synchronization system for the music. It didn’t come to anything once the pandemic ended, but it sowed the seeds for what was about to come.

Winning More Funding and Building a Team

We then won more funding to develop live-streamed augmented reality performances. Everything changed at this point for Copper Candle because it was due to this funding that Andrew Voller agreed to start working with me. Since then, largely due to his brilliance and technical talents, we have worked closely together to create inspiring new technologies and deliver some amazing projects. We have continued to win funding for new innovations and have created a technology stack that allows us to produce live events tools that are unique.

I’ve had three opportunities to travel around the world as part of Innovate UK's Global Business Innovation Programme, taking me to SXSW in Austin, South Korea, and Slush in Finland with Creative Catalyst.

Achievements and Future Plans

Since late 2020, Andy and I have managed to secure patents for new technologies we developed, won a 3-in-1 award for innovation from Plasa, and delivered projects on four continents. I couldn’t be prouder of what we have achieved. The team grows and shrinks as projects come in and out, but we are now looking towards the future and our plans to build the most expansive metaverse entertainment platform ever conceived.

Looking Ahead

We are now part of the Creative UK Investment Readiness Programme and are taking our company out to market to raise the investment needed to build our pioneering metaverse offering. I wish I could go back in time and tell 17-year-old me that 22 years later, my dream is close to coming true. So here’s to 20 years of being a company founder, and to all of those who have ever thought about starting a business of their own: dream big and make it happen.