On a film set, when lighting for beauty shots,  cinematographers use the biggest, softest lights we have, to make actors and models look their best. 

Why? 

A big light wraps gently around features on the face, and a soft light evens out skin tone and diffuses any hard shadows – so bumps and creases disappear. 

Created by Australian film professionals and based on these lighting principles, BIGSOFTI is a mobile, high quality, bi-colour LED soft panel that delivers stunning diffused lighting for better photos, videos and video calls on all your devices.

• Universal clip fits all leading smartphone, tablet and laptop brands.
• Shoe mount with 1/4″-20 thread fits all cameras, tripods and light stands.
• 3M Adhesive Mount for computer monitors and other general surfaces.

   

Late night FaceTime calls with the team overseas? Make sure you always look your best with soft bright mobile lighting. 

With a variety of different ways to mount BIGSOFTI,  you can use it all sorts of different places for all sorts of different purposes.

Do you shoot handheld on a gimbal? We know they can be tough to balance. BIGSOFTI weighs just 74 grams (2.6 oz) – it’s so lightweight, you’ll hardly feel it.

Aussie DOP Peter Eastgate ACS (Netflix “GO”) on a recent FOXTEL TV commercial using BIGSOFTI as an eye light.   

Whether you’re a cinematographer on an Arri Alexa or an influencer shooting content on your iPhone – BIGSOFTI will help brighten up your frames.

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Simple 2 button function – for a combination of 9 different light settings:

Button 1 – Power On & Brightness Adjust – LOW – MID – MAX. 

Button 2 – 3 Colour Temperature Setting – DAYLIGHT – CLEAN WHITE – TUNGSTEN.

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Control your lighting angle by up to 45 degrees with the rotating barrel connector built into all accessory mounts.

Easily attaches to mobiles in seconds via the bowed flex of the universal clip. Over-moulded rubber edges for great grip that will never scratch your devices.

The design of the Universal Clip has been created to fit phones both with cases and those without. Flexible and resilient to fit all leading smartphone, tablets and laptops. 

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Quick and easy accessory changes with the custom rotating barrel mount. Each accessory simple slides in and out.

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Cold-shoe attachment designed to fit traditional cameras. Plus 1/4″ 20 thread mount in base allows for use on tripods and light stands.

BIGSOFTI has been designed for maximum big-ness but to still to have a footprint smaller than your mobile. Size compared here to the regular iPhone X.

The battery on our prototypes was 1000mAh.  In testing we have measured run times at approx:

95 mins at MAX | 140 mins at MID | 240 mins at LOW.

And full charge from flat is around 2 hrs. *Subject to battery age and weather conditions. 

But with our stretch goals achieved, we can upgrade the size of this battery by 1.5X to a 1500mAh battery – which will increase these timings.

USB-C allows for operation while charging, so if a need ever arises the unit can be run from a power source.

As we are injection moulding the diffusion panel, we will have full control of elements that effect the panel opacity (we’ll be experimenting with the mix of composite ingredients / diffusing powders that give a glow effect etc). Once we have the tooling complete and can experiment with these options, fine tuning will take place to balance the LED outputs VS the diffusion opacity. As a result run times may vary up or down slightly in final production model.

While CRI is a commonly cited score, as a film professional, a more important rating is the Television Lighting Consistency Index or TLCI.  It also runs from 0-100.  Our LED rating of 98+ puts us in the range where any colour variation is so small, a film colourist would not consider correcting it.  

We’ve been hard at work over the past three weeks confirming the final details of our tooling setup – we have paid and signed our contract and have been working on the finer points of the design, with tool cutting due to commence any day. We have opted to work with a higher precision tooling company as it will both allow us to produce more units faster, and also deliver a product with a higher quality finish.  

We’re also excited to announce that since we can now order at higher volume, we have been able to negotiate some rates and add a couple of pretty cool features that will now be shipped with every BIGSOFTI.

And after hitting our $650K Stretch Goal – every single BIGSOFTI shipped to every backer will now have a 1500mAh battery!

Grab a single BIGSOFTI for perfect front lit photos and video direct from your mobile, tablet, laptop or camera. The diffused lighting from our photography grade, bi-colour LEDs will help you create more professional looking content quickly and easily. 

Get a two pack for a ‘two-light setup’ – the standard for most simple filming situations.

Key light: The key light is the strongest, providing most of the light in the shot. It’s generally placed in front of your subject, around 45-degrees above and 45-degrees to the right or left.  You can use BIGSOFTI at a higher setting for your key light.

Fill light: This is a lower intensity light, used to fill in shadows on the subject’s face. It should be positioned to the side opposite the key light. You can use BIGSOFTI at a lower setting for your fill light. 

And if you want to look even better you add a third light . . .

Follow the two-light setup above, but also position your third light behind your subject facing back towards the camera. This backlight or hair-light throws a lovely rim of light to help separate your subject from your background for added depth to the image – making your content look more professional.

My name is Al Morrow, I’m a Sydney-based TV commercial director who’s worked with global brands in both Australia and the US for over a decade.  

I’m the guy who walks into a room and has to fight the urge to adjust the lights. Lighting quality literally affects how we see the world, and yet so many people hardly give it enough thought.

I know how important lighting is when filming, well, anything and because I shoot photos and videos on my phone all the time, I wanted to bring the same kind of high-quality light that I use on my film sets to my mobile.

Even though I’d been thinking of ways to bring film lighting to my phone, my ‘aha’ moment for BIGSOFTI didn’t come on set or even during a shoot. It came one day in the car. My wife was driving and her sister was in the backseat; taking selfie after selfie. She was holding up a jacket to cut out the direct sunlight and complaining that her photos either had too many hard shadows or were being blasted by the phone flash.

I commented to her, that without her knowing it, she was cutting and shaping light in a similar way that we would on a film set and that if she wanted full control of her image, she’d need to have a small, powerful, soft light with her. Her face lit up (no pun intended) ‘that would be great!’. Many months later, she was the first person we started our tests on, comparing our soft light to the hard light of the phone flash.

That was when I realised this was not just a product I would use. Everyone (director or not), uses cameras and anyone shooting photos or videos needs good light.

The first thing I did when I got home that evening was to look at what products already existed in this space. There were phone cases that seemed cumbersome. Products that were made with cheap, low-quality LEDs. Lighting attachments that were too big, too heavy, too expensive.

There seemed to be a gap in the market! I was curious to see if we could address these design flaws and make something better – and the BIGSOFTI journey began.

BIGSOFTI began with me in my office pulling apart LED products I bought on ebay and hacking bits together but it really shifted gear when I brought on the team at Vert Design. 

I was impressed by both their enthusiasm and their experience (they had designed products for clients such as SONY, INTEL, BMW and DEUS among others) and, from the outset, our partnership was a perfect combination of my knowledge of lighting and photography and their passion for user-focused design.

We set off on two things: 1. Start on initial designs. 2. Find the right manufacturing partner.

Throughout the process, Head Designer Andrew Simpson spoke about product design being a ‘swinging pendulum’ between tech functionality and human interaction. Swing too far in one direction you lose the core practicality of the product, too far in the other direction and you lose the great user experience. We needed to make a product that was the perfect combination of both.

Initially, we created a light panel that would attach to the underside of a flip-out phone case. We found that while the function of the light module worked well, the user interaction with the design was lacking. We showed it to family, friends and colleagues who loved the effect of the lighting, but not the experience so we went back to the drawing board.

We explored fixed universal clips, magnetic blocks, locking rubber lugs, even a metal arm and shoe mount. We were split on the clip VS rubber lug and so decided to run some market research through the digital platform OnePulse, asking a focus group of 500 men and women 18-35, across the UK and US which design they preferred. A resounding eighty-five per cent said the clip-on design.

Our direction became very clear. Several iterations later, we now have a rotating, removable mechanism (patent pending), which houses a universal clip for all leading smartphone, tablet and laptop brands. Plus the additional features of a cold shoe camera mount with ¼” 20 thread mount and the 3M Adhesive Mount for general surfaces. It’s this simple versatility that helps put BIGSOFTI into its own category – being effortlessly transferrable across all your devices. 

We had our design, now we needed to get it made. After a false start with our initial manufacturer (bad communication, high costs, lack of knowledge and lack of passion about the product) we were put in touch with a man named Hunter Ho; an LED lighting product specialist.

During our first meeting with Hunter, we discussed the technical requirements of LED numbers, size, spacing and distance, colour temp,  CRI and TLCI ratings, the diffusing materials, batteries and charge times, circuits and regulatory approval checks. Hunter had an answer to all our questions and within a few days had sent us itemised quotes with unit numbers, costs, recommendations and timelines.

With Hunter’s input we were able to improve the lighting board and PCB layout, update the charge port to USB-C and increase the battery size and run time.  But most importantly, we were able to update the quality of our LEDs.

We are now working with specialised, photography grade BI-COLOUR LEDs, so new that they may have never been used in a device this small before. They deliver changeable colour temperature functionality – with options for all scenarios – DAYLIGHT (5500K), TUNGSTEN (3000K) and a CLEAN MIX (4000K). Which means awesome colour reproduction for better images. We are super confident in our design and just as confident in our manufacturer. 

Now that we had our product designed, user tested and refined – it was time to get to watch it in action out in the real world. I roped in some folks to have a play and my very generous brother Matt came along and filmed BIGSOFTI … being used for selfies, on top of a camera gimbal, taking photos of food, for FaceTime video in the back of an Uber and zoom video conferencing at home on the laptop. This is what we made. 

During these uncertain times in the world, shipping costs have gone up significantly, however, we believe these prices should return to normal as the global situation improves. To therefore minimise costs for our backers, we will not be charging the current higher shipping charges at the time of pledging.

Shipping, Taxes (and VAT / GST) will be calculated and paid for towards the end of the campaign, just before we ship out to our supporters.  This is being managed through BackerKit who will be in contact via email. 

We will be working hard to secure you the best shipping prices. The good news is that BIGSOFTI is small and lightweight, so multipack purchases will be charged at a slightly discounted rate, so please consider ordering for someone else too, to help us cut down on shipping costs and air miles.

We were always planning to launch BIGSOFTI in the first few months of this year, and obviously things have been a little held up by this very strange and difficult time out there.

We’ve stayed across developments of COVID-19 from the very beginning, as news of the pandemic first began to spread in China. We have adjusted our delivery timelines to take into consideration any delays that might be encountered as we move into tooling and production.

COVID-19 is certainly going to impact the way we work and communicate for the next little while. There is generally a movement towards remote working and this is only going to increase, and with that, comes adjusting to the new norm of endless video calls both for personal and business reasons. 

We know there is a lot about social distancing that has been difficult.  Never-ending video calls is just one minor impact of the current situation.  But if BIGSOFTI can help solve this one little problem then great.