The History of Capture
Conception
The idea of creating a lighting design software was born in 1994. Lars was spending a week of school work experience at a theatre in Gothenburg called Folkteatern where Lasse was the resident lighting designer. Coincidentally, they both shared an interest in Amiga computers.
Lars and Lasse stayed in contact as Lars continued working on the first version of the software. In January 1998 version 1 of Capture was ready. Lasse took on the job selling the software to the world, beginning with a couple of local theaters in Gothenburg.
Our first complete rewrite took place for Capture version 3, released i 2002.
Libraries
(Photo with Vangelis at a console?)
The library was tiny. New fixtures were coming. Somebody more was needed.
One of our first customers, Vangelis joined in 2004 as library manager.
Eurovision Song Contest
With added strength we were now working on the upcoming 2005 version. This version was really going to be put to its test during the production of the Eurovision Song Contest 2005 where Swedish lighting designer Pontus 'Bullen' Lagerbielke deployed it along the AVAB Congo console, also not yet released at that point.
The production was a great milestone for us and Vangelis got to enjoy the finals in Kyiv, where Swedish-born Helena Paparizou brought the victory to Greece!
Capture Polar
Our greatest hit ever was arguably Capture Polar, the version to follow Capture 2005. It made such an impact that many customers kept referring our software as 'Capture Polar', even long after we had dropped the name.
The name 'Polar' was a play on our northern origins, after some customer had mistaken us from being from Switzerland and not Sweden, asking if the software would come with (Swiss) chocolate.
Capture Polar introduced Mac OS X support.
Limited company
In 2010 Lars, Lasse and Vangelis formed Capture Visualisation AB, a limited company registered in Sweden.
In 2012 AtlaBase was founded.
In 2015 we hired Mathias.
In 2016 Lasse left the company's board and Vangelis took over his position as sales manager. Lasse remained our graphical designer and adviser to the board for several years.
In 2018 we acquired the capture.se domain and phased out our previous capturesweden.com domain along with the "Capture Sweden" trade name we had been using so far.
In 2019 we introduced our new five colours logo inspired by the Munsell colour system.
In 2022 we hired Pelle.