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Who We Are.
Who we are, what we make and how we do it.
James
James founded Copper Candle to address the rise in XR content needed in the theatre and live experiences industry. His background in previsualisation at the Royal Opera House, National Theatre and many West End productions and international tours has been supported by his innovations in technology, developing custom solutions for clients who want VR or MR experiences. He now combines this with his passion for creating immersive digital experiences and developing the technology to help his projects and his clients projects become technical and creative successes.
His passion is where creativity and technology meet, finding solutions to support artists realise their ideas. He wants to create experiences that amaze audiences and builds new relationships with the art. Digital technology is giving us the opportunity to democratise art, make it accessible and available to anyone and James wants to help bring new audiences to our stories through XR.
Andrew
Andrew is a lighting designer with over 20 years experience lighting productions all over the world. Alongside his own design work, Andrew has worked as a moving light programmer on theatrical productions and large scale television events, including the London 2012, Sochi 2014, Rio 2016 Olympic/Paralympic opening and closing ceremonies and the Eurovision Song Contest in Russia (2009) and Norway (2010). Details of Andrew's lighting design and programming work can be found at his website.
While at school, Andrew developed an interest in computer programming. Over the years, there were several projects that allowed Andrew to combine his interest in computer programming with the world of entertainment lighting. In 2012, Moving Light Assistant was released to document the lighting programming on productions. Moving Light Assistant is used on many West End and Broadway shows, as well as many theatres including the Royal Opera House and National Theatre in London.
Our Approach
We look for technology solutions to creative ideas.
Whether our own creative project or working with someone else's, we deploy our own technology solutions and products to make our projects bigger, quicker and more efficient.
Our team are creative theatre professionals, with heaps of experience working across a range of industries so we want to work with our clients to come up with the ideas, help you think in new ways or just guide you through the potential of XR technology.
We deliver projects within our team and with our experienced freelance network, but also work in collaborations with larger or specialist studios who we work well with and allow us to deliver much larger projects.
Technology
We are geeks at heart and are constantly exploring how new technology can be utilised in our projects.
The backbone of most of our projects is XR (virtual, augmented and mixed reality) and real-time game engines, Unity and Unreal Engine. We have developed our own plugins which allow us to integrate with other technologies such as stage and theatre control systems and have patents pending on our latest ideas.
We are connected with Rose Bruford College's Centre for Digital Production which includes a Digital Studio and motion capture suite. We work with RBC to provide facilities for our clients projects and involve them on our research projects. Copper Candle uses motion capture and tracking technology to create custom animations of characters and develop virtual production systems for live streaming with real-time content in Unreal Engine.
© 2021 Copper Candle. Made in Wix.
R&D
We engage in academic research and collaborate as an SME to HEI funding bids. As academics and researchers too, we understand the process and can generate our own contribution to publications but can bring our professional experience and practical process into the team.
Nearly every piece of work we do includes something new that hasn't been done before and our favourite part of the process is prototyping new technology to discover something new.
We have many peer-reviewed publications between us where we share the discoveries of our practice-based work and try to instil a process of capture and collection to all of our projects so we are ready to disseminate our learnings.