User:Alan Briggs

Alan Briggs, born 1947, England. Portrait-Painter and Digital Arts pioneer. Alan Briggs first made the media in the 1950s and 60s in Scotland, when two national newspapers (“Scotsman” and “Scottish Daily Express”) published articles about the “Teenage Prodigy” and his paintings. (Years later, in the mid-70s, he was the subject of a feature-article in The Scotsman again, describing him as “Sergeant Sunshine, Edinburgh’s King of the Hippies”).

His portrait work flourished in the late 1960s, early 70s, when, having moved to London, he was often commissioned to paint portraits of pop-stars and celebrities of the era. But during this period, his art-work was becoming less rewarding, with the arrival of new printing technologies, which made life hard for all the middle-ranking artists and painters of the time. The Photographer became the new portrait-painter, and cheap, but good quality, Poster-printing technology meant everyone could own a portrait of their chosen Star.

His pop-star and celebrity commissions, however, brought him into contact with the newly-emerging Independent Music Business, and he had begun promoting small concerts in and around Edinburgh. By accident as much as any intention, Alan Briggs began making a living, and a name, for himself on the fringes of the Scottish Music Scene, slowly working his way closer to its heart. He brought bands from London, to Edinburgh, and put local acts on the same show, as opening-Acts. This grew into Briggs Gigs, Ltd.. These local bands got to hear about his great hobby at the time, collecting Reel-To-Reel tape-recorders, and many of them asked to borrow a machine to record a rehearsal, or Live Performance, and this grew into a chain of small recording-studios up and down the UK. As is usual with emerging rock-bands, they didn’t have a lot of cash, so often paid for recording-time by bartering old or broken Sound-equipment, which Briggs enjoyed tinkering with, and sometimes bringing the items back to usable life. These pieces of Sound-equipment eventually grew into a PA Hire, and Trucking business, called “Stage-Truck”. He promoted UK Tours, and learned the travel-logistics of taking bands around Europe, before finally opening his own venue in London, in 1980.

Called “The Fair Deal”, it was the largest-capacity indoor venue to be custom-designed for rock concerts, and all the great bands played there. It had 64 tons of Sound and lighting, designed by Stephen Court, sound-designer for Pink Floyd, and it had the largest Digital Multi-track Studio in Britain at the time. It also had a 20-camera Video-studio. It closed in 1982 as the result of a messy divorce, and is now called Brixton Academy. Briggs went back to painting for a couple of years, and decided to only paint the subjects he wanted to paint – no more painting commissions just for the money.

In 1984, he re-married, to Meg Shanks, a drama-teacher with her own Acting-School in Wimbledon Theatre, London. With his video-equipment, and her student-actors, they produced “Suffer, Little Children” as a “school project”, but Briggs’s promotional skills took a not-very-good school project to the top of the Video-Charts, where it outsold Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

In 1988, he came into contact with computers for the first time, in San Francisco, and another career-change began, again an accident, simply deriving from his enjoyment of playing with interesting new toys.

He has often maintained that what he does is all just “Making Pictures”: a picture on a piece of paper, a sound-picture, created by music and kept on audio-tape, video-pictures kept on video-tape, and now all of these things can be created on, and stored in a Hard Drive in a computer.

However, his artistic background, his music and audio-recording background, his experience of video from the early 1980s, and his experience of making a living to a tightly-budgeted Production-schedule for the travel and music-videos, all of these are now channeled into developing Digital Television production techniques, with Zero-budgets as his goal, and showing other people how to do this. Indeed, he now maintains that any and every digitally-produced full-length movie can now be made for under $250,000US excluding the cost of Star talent.

The Digital connection began in 1991, when attending a Computer-Graphics exhibition, he developed a big crowd, simply by taking over the Amiga stand, and producing amazing artworks with a mouse, and the 16 colours of Windows Paint. CalComp first gave him a graphic tablet, and a copy of the very first “Painter” software, and with these new tools, he began to paint again, this time in the computer.

Throughout the 1990s, he led the way in Computer Graphics simply by asking questions of the big companies, and forcing answers out of them. IBM gave him computers, JVC provided Monitors, CalComp and later Wacom provided generation after generation of graphic tablet. Sadly, Fractal Design Painter was taken over by Corel, and the software lost its heart, to become just another over-priced, over-loaded software. “I just find it easy to draw and paint in the computer, and making a moving picture, or video, is no different. It always comes down to Content, Composition, Lighting, and Atmosphere and Emotion. The techniques are simple, it’s most video software that’s a pain!”.

In the background to all this are his plans to enable groups of friends to start up their own television channel. Where once, 4 or 5 friends would get together to become a rock-band, now they can make themselves into the rock band that recorded the soundtrack to the movie they all wrote and produced, and starred in themselves, along with friends and fans. It will happen, because it can all just about be done on a couple of mobile phones now!

This Research and Development work has been subsidised by the occasional return to promoting shows, like the Reggae Festival he promoted in 2005 in Hawaii, which was so successful that dozens of wannabee promoters thought they could do it just as easily. Now, no bands will play the Big Island due the mistakes and disasters made by greedy amateurs. Also in Hawaii, he was invited to attend the conference put together by The Alternative-Telecommunications Executives for their annual summit meeting, which put music and computers side-by-side in the Hawaiian Islands.

His first attempt at setting up a Zero-Cost Digital TV Channel, in Malaysia, resulted in his partners going their own way, with only superficial understanding, and creating a Digital Disaster, which made (still makes?) it impossible for professionals to do it properly, now, in Malaysia.

This drove him back into the hard-core technology, away from people, where he has been exposing the lies and deceits of the telecoms giants, and developing a Business-Plan that legally gives users much more than the Giants offer, for far less money. These thoughts brought him back to the UK, to find ways to expose the deceits by creating a Business-Model that works in a more sane, sensible and ethical way.

In the meantime, as of November 2013, he is looking for people who would like to join him in an Edinburgh-based Digital Production that will demonstrate, and prove convincingly, how cheaply Movies and TV Shows can now be made, if you rely on creative use of the technology, and develop new techniques and skill-sets accordingly.

Alan Briggs can always be reached at alanbriggs44@yahoo.co.uk. Relevant web-confirmations: Fair Deal – http://www.brixton-academy.co.uk/history.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brixton_Academy http://homepage.mac.com/blackmarketclash/Bands/Clash/recordings/1982/82-07-30%20Brixton%20Fair%20Deal/82-07-30%20Brixton%20FD.html Suffer Little Children – http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0457148/usercomments