LightGrid History

After decades of work in commercial photography, Bill Delzell started Blue Sky Rental Studios. Since 1996 Blue Sky specialized in providing Bay Area filmmakers and photographers with the finest daylight studios and services available. Blue Sky worked with the country's top businesses including numerous Fortune 500 companies for almost 20 years. Based in San Francisco, Blue Sky was Northern California's premier destinations for commercial, corporate, and consumer photography.

LightGrid, a patented technology came from that experience. It digitally captures images and videos from pre-formulated lighting settings. Clients can capture the perfect image every time with the touch of a button. The LightGrid is an interactive, creative space where virtually anyone can produce professional-quality images and video in just minutes for the internet, social networks, or simply for the fun of it.

Yoko Kubrick

Yoko Kubrick is an American sculptor of Japanese and Czech heritage. She grew up in Guam, Hawaii, California and the Czech Republic. The contrasting cultures would later inform her work as a sculptor and arouse her interest in the arts.

Yoko’s sculptures explore the aesthetic perceptions of forms found in nature, and explore the emotional qualities of shapes, what she calls “the emotive language of form.” Plant life, water movement and land formations inform her visual vocabulary. She expresses her internal world by breathing life into materials using the poetry of line, light, form and shadow.The anthropomorphism of her pieces articulate the drama of human existence and our search for meaning in everyday life. Starting with these basic constructs, her works explore allegories informed by classical mythology. An abstraction of a river as a metaphor for its life giving waters takes on the sensual curve of Aphrodites hips. Perceptions of energy and waters gentle undulations are transferred into the stone, the fleeting and ephemeral into an enduring abstract form.

Yoko has a B.A. in Environmental Studies from San Jose State University, and an M.A. in Psychology and Art


Therapy from Notre Dame de Namur University. She was trained in a sculpture atelier setting in traditional bronze casting and fabrication, and later in marble carving. She studied briefly at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara (in Carrara, Italy) before dropping out to work alongside professional sculptors in a marble atelier. She currently divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Tuscany, Italy.

49ER CHEERLEADERS ARE BACK

We had an exciting first shoot at our new location in the heart of the Peninsula, conveniently located halfway between Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Here are a couple of our favorite shots of the 49er Gold Rush Cheerleaders. We welcome you to cheer us on in this promising new space hosted by Meets The Eye studio.

To see more photos check out the Gold Rush Instagram page

JCLU FOREVER SHOWS FAITH IN THE LIGHTGRID

Local Bay Area Christian clothing company, JCLU Forever, recently captured their new T-shirt line in The LightGrid. The photographs highlight the company’s unique and stylish approach to making Christian tees fashionable for anyone who wants to proudly proclaim their faith. For more shots visit their site at JCLU Forever.

Photographer: Austin Heppler

MUA: Sterling Andrews

Stylist: Adrea Cabrera

Model: Jenna Davi

Our Mission & Impact

What is the long-term vision of the LightGrid

LightGrid will democratize the creation of video and still photography production in the studio and more casual environments, making it easy for businesses of any size or ordinary people with limited production budgets to produce high-quality imagery.
Further, we intend to analyze, structure and deliver that visual content in ways that transform it from being a long-form view-only medium to a fine-grained, interactive, and conversational one. This makes a video more compelling and effective for individuals to learn from and supports communities who can develop and refine complex ideas in video discourse.

What problem are we solving and for whom? Who will benefit?

The media landscape is rapidly changing and transforming how we transfer knowledge. AI and specifically NI (Narrative Intelligence) plays an integral role in this transformation as it grapples with what Stanford philosophy professor Ken Taylor calls “the other” -- that is, how cultures experience and sort out their differences. Doing this well, aided by advanced technologies that our company is developing, helps evoke empathy and better communication and learning. Communication and connection are at the center of how we begin to solve humanity's problems over the next century. It is a big problem and everyone should benefit.

Who is our first target customer? How is their problem being currently addressed or solved?

We envision the company’s system as an integrated ‘intelligent” rich media capture appliance that will allow our customers to quickly and efficiently record and distribute advertising, educational and training videos and more effectively engages in knowledge transfer. Our media capture and management system, enhanced with robotics and machine learning, plays an integral part of their vision. Our R&D efforts in automatic content indexing and narrative intelligence to create richer exchanges of media content is a key differentiator in their messaging and streaming strategy.

What is your current business model?

We are testing three different revenue streams, including direct sales and franchising our successful prototype deployment. Once a LightGrid is in a customer's or operator's hands, there will be opportunities for various sorts of usage-based licensing and expanded services for ongoing revenue. In our deployed prototype, we have been successful by billing hourly with menus of value-added services. As our content structuring matures, our software infrastructure indexing and threaded playback will become an important value for our customers.

What future trends, technology or market conditions make it the right time to build this company and how does our product tap into this trend?

The current trends towards 4K video content and high-quality streaming over IP (and emerging 5G) networks, coupled with AI, IoT, Industry 4.0, and the burgeoning knowledge transfer and educational technology marketplaces. Our smart platform for content capture, automated indexing and editing, flexible and right-sized distribution, and analytics sits squarely in the center of opportunities across these markets. Use cases for us at this early stage with Singularity University and YouTube will lay the groundwork for the company as we evolve with these emerging growth markets and more.

What are the top 3 milestones the company has achieved in product and customer development and how long did it take to reach them?

  1. Acquisition of extensive library (from 10,000 customer engagements and hundreds of thousands of media assets gathered with our prototype system) of meta-data from image capture provides us with a solid foundation for our software, fodder for big-data analysis, and an understanding of customer needs.

  2. Working, robust, field-tested and financially viable lighting system for photography (and, later, videography) with zero failures over approximately 20000+ hours and counting.

  3. Implementation of virtual director “eye-gaze vector” system to allow for remote interviewing of subjects in the system. First live-tested with a survivor of the Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooting on July 28, 2019.

How many paying customers does the company have to date?

Over 10,000 as of July, 2019.

Clarifications on the values of active users or paying customers above

There are two levels of "customer" for LightGrid, purchasers/operators and end-users. We have had thousands of end-users (image-makers paying for time in the LightGrid), for the prototype grid, but there are still only two LightGrids in existence.

Customer Outcomes

Peak Design

THANK YOU EVERYONE!

To everybody who backed this project -- thank you. Your incredible support and constructive feedback transformed the Capture Camera Clip System from an idea to reality. In turn, it has transformed my life.  On May 2, 2011, I launched Capture as a guy with a dream, out on a limb.  75 incredible days later, I am a father with a business.  There are a lot of stories written in the course of each of our lives.  This Kickstarter campaign will be forever remembered for me as one that changed my life.  I will continue to do everything that I can to ensure that the direction of that change is positive for Capture users, and for my family.

Whether you’re an artist, documentarian, musician or designer, crowdsource funding is changing the game. You no longer need deep pockets or equity grabbing venture capital firms to bring a vision to fruition. You just need a good idea and a bunch of other folks out there who share your passion. Thank you, Kickstarter for doing what you’ve done, and thank you backers, for sharing my vision.

IIMUAHII

Juan Zambrano teamed up with CG artist Stephen Wheeler to create these stunning images that appeared on Season 10 of Project Runway.

Born from a media team that comprised CG artist Stephen Wheeler and international advertising photographer Juan Zambrano, the IIMUAHII COUTURE lookbook took Elena’s futuristic fashion designs and set them against the all-white rooms and angular lines of a modern home. Using modo’s modeling tools, Stephen was able to build walkways, bend walls and refine the architecture of four full rooms from scratch, giving his collaborators something they could critique and comment on well before the project’s accelerated timeline was up. The approved environments were then rendered photorealistically, resulting in image assets that were magazine-ready before the models started posing for their pictures.

Racing Extintion

Academy award nominated movie for best documentary. The LightGrid and Obscura Digital collaborated to create a time-lapse sequence in order to bring awareness to climate change. #projectingchange #climate2014

Here are a few behind the scene shots of the production team in action.