Alexander Stuart

Haptic and virtual reality currently involve suits and headsets like this. Hopefully not forever! Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin. When Mike White interviewed me for The Projection Booth podcast about my work on the early scripts for Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, we talked some more about other topics - and Mike was kind enough to feature a bonus interview with me. You can listen here (it's about 27 minutes long) or at The Projection Booth (Bonus Interview: Alexander Stuart) Download the Episode   The Projection Booth Bonus Interview: Alexander Stuart (27 minutes)  I talk about Silicon Valley and tech, which I love, about how I see entertainment evolving - including virtual reality and haptic reality, which involves touch, but hopefully can evolve quickly past body suits and headsets - and about the epic (in terms of my life) novel I'm writing, Chinatown Nights....

I was thrilled to be interviewed recently by Mike White  about my work on the first three drafts of the script for Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin , starring Scarlett Johansson , for The Projection Booth podcast. The Under The Skin podcast also features Alexandra West of the Faculty of Horror podcast , with whom Mike and Projection Booth cohost Rob St Mary discuss a particularly sexist review of Under The Skin by Horribly Hooched , which seems to reduce the film to a porn flick (I haven't read the review). Anyway, if you'd like to hear the podcast, which is two hours forty-five minutes long (I appear toward the end), you can listen at The Projection Booth or, thanks to Mike, right here on my blog: Download the Episode The Projection Booth Under The Skin podcast (2 hours 45 minutes) If you'd like to read more about my work on Under The Skin, please visit this page - and for Ryan Gilbey's New Statesman piece about m...

In 1967, The Beatles took part in the first ever live international satellite television event, Our World , by performing a new song for the first time to an audience of between 400 million and 700 million people in 31 countries.  The song was All You Need Is Love , a composition written mostly by John Lennon (according to Paul McCartney), and you can find excellent video of the live satellite debut performance at Sydney Urshan's Facebook page (you don't have to join Facebook to watch it; despite the fact that the page suggests you can embed the video, I haven't been able to) . It is hard to communicate just how extraordinary was the experience of watching the Beatles perform this song live "all over the globe." Aside from capturing the world's attention with a truly newsworthy event, in 1967 the Beatles were at the height of their Indian meditation/LSD-influenced/Summer of Love "anti-establishment" rebelliousness, and the...

It's fantastic that Chinese actress/director/singer Zhao Wei , about whom I blogged repeatedly in 2013, is now a billionaire, according to Forbes.   Her directorial debut, So Young , about a group of college students, was a huge success, earning $118 million in mainland China alone and making it the fifth highest grossing Chinese movie of all time when released.  (I wrote about the film's opening week success in a post titled Zhao Wei's So Young So Successful In China. I also posted video of Zhao Wei on the set of her directorial debut, So Young .)  As Forbes reports, it is Zhao's shrewd investments, as much as her huge success across many fields of entertainment, that have earned her the nickname, "China's show-business Buffet." In particular, Zhao acquired a 9.18% stake in her close friend Jack Ma's company Alibaba Pictures in 2014, for an investment of $400 million. Ma had invited Zhao to invest, in order to add so...

Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. A couple of weeks ago, our family was lucky enough to have a tour of Dash Robotics' facility in Sunnyvale, California, where Nick Kohut and his partners have a young startup designing and manufacturing remarkable little robot bugs that you can control with your smartphone or tablet.  My son, Hudson, and I had first seen these at a tech convention in San Francisco organized by getgeeked  and SVEntrepreneurs . We had been impressed by both the robots' speed and agility - as well as by the fact that you can build the robot's "skin" from a single sheet of plastic, and swap it out later if you want to change the robot's color or design.  Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Nick Kohut, cofounder of Dash Robotics. Photograph copyright © 2015 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Nick, who showed us around the Dash facility himself, met his partners, Andrew Gillies...