and finally, spending too much time on your smartphone? google suggests popping it in an envelope. google envelope is an app used in conjunction with a paper cover you can print out at home. the combo can dumb down your device so it can only make and receive calls or transform it into a photo and video camera with no screen, although it only currently works on the pixel 3a. will it work? answer‘s on a postcard. a couple of years ago, amid terrible wildfires in the us, we went on location with california's firefighters to see how they were using tech to battle the blazes. drones have become a big tool in the firefighters' arsenal, but for how much longer will they fly? early this month, the trump administration called

for all chinese—made drones to be banned from governmental work. and where are most drones made? yeah, that's right. fears were raised that they could be used for spying — and the us now wants its own drone tech to catch up with china. this, then, is another tech battle brewing between the us and china. and could this really ultimately effect innovation, even delivery? and with such a large population, china is looking at this — and many other ways — to speed up the delivery process. it's already making a lot of headway, so could president trump's anti—chinese stance now end up stymieing us innovation in this area? stephen beckett delivered this from guangzhou.

when you think of drones, perhaps you think of something like this. or maybe this. well, how about this? so this is ehang's testing headquarters in guangzhou, and this is their passenger drone that they are developing. the idea is that this could ferry passengers from a to b around the world and it could even be flying in the skies in the next couple of months. it can go 135 miles per hourfor up to 35 km, so you can imagine if it takes off, it could be a pretty quick way to get around. so this what it looks like inside. got a little cockpit that you can climb into and you can close the door. get yourself nice and cosy. and there's even a seat belt. this can carry up to 220 kilograms, so a couple of passengers, and... you know, it's pretty cosy but if it gets you there quickly, that could be all right. the whole aviation industry has, you know, existed for a century and there was nothing fundamental changed in the past one century. ehang as a company started

to think about building a passenger aircraft, you know, self—piloting ones, starting for many years ago. we thought, is there any alternative? is there we can make a safer, you know, aircraft in the future? at the moment, they're working on getting commercial approval to fly flights over the city. but they haven't got that yet, so that has to go up unmanned at the moment, so we'lljust have to watch. wow! that is pretty serious! imagine that flying over your city. you'd definitely know about it. it's certainly a glimpse into the future and it could make delivering people and packages very quick indeed. but instead of going physically faster, another way for deliveries to arrive sooner is to store them closer to where they need to go. jd.com, china's second—biggest online retailer, has been trying to dojust this in beijing. people in china don't tend to drink a lot of tap water.

that means, in cities at least, they're probably drinking a lot of bottled water instead. that means they've got to get it delivered to their house. and if they're doing that, then it's got to come from a place like this. this is a water station. to get water at the moment, you have to phone one of the many local companies. it's all very manual and can be quite slow. translation: people are no longer satisfied with a 24—hour or even a half—day delivery. what they want is a situation where, say, you're making your dinner at home, you need rice or water delivered to your kitchen asap — and there it is. jd could be called china's answer to amazon. it's got big warehouses. but that means they can only be so close to the centre of the city. and that's where the water stations come in. dotted around beijing, they essentially act as jd depots in miniature. so now, you order water on an app and jd automatically sends the order through to a water station close to you. it could be one just around the corner and they say that makes it really quick. so, we wanted to see this in action.

so our fixer has gone to a house on the other side of town. she's about to put in an order. we are going to chase it and see if it gets there. she's put the order in, so we are just waiting for it to come through. very exciting. follow that tuk—tuk! so we're here. took about 20 minutes. i think that's the fastest it can be. i think it can be anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple of hours depending on where they are in the city, how busy they are, that sort of thing. but all of this innovation may only be possible because of a unique situation in china. in china, delivery workers are not contracted. they aren't paid minimum wages or have any kind of social security net. and they're basically earning money on a piecemeal basis of, say,

50 cents for every delivery that they make. that leads to a huge number of precarious workers that really are supplying the foundations of the online economy in china. in developed economies like the uk, where there is minimal wages and wage levels are generally higher, the cut that delivery would take of many services would make them possibly unviable for people to buy. remember ehang? they've also been working on a trial to deliver, amongst other things, fast food. so this app actually lets you get things delivered to you by drone. there's a few different options, different people, that are offering the service. we'll get some fast food today — and i think we'll order six coffees because there's a few people here. we just need to pick our drone delivery zone. there's only one nearby, which is one just outside, and if we pay now, we should have some coffee! touchdown! i'll see if i can get into it.

this is a coffee that's come from, it looks like, mcdonald's. so presumably there's a mcdonald's somewhere that's got a drone port. well, it's certainly more slightly complicated than a cafeteria. that's it. back to wherever it came from. not entirely convinced that you want to do it to order a coffee, but you can imagine if you needed an urgent parcel or something like that, that could be pretty helpful. but you don't want that landing in your backyard, do you, really? i think drone ports like these make a lot of sense. there's no doubt that what they're doing in delivery here is pretty innovative. but the question is, can the business models that make sense in china still work in other places around the world ? in the race to go global, the real challenge could be making sure that regulation and safety come along for the ride. that was steve in china. now, much earlier than normal, we find ourselves in 0scars season. it's the academy awards in a few weeks' time.

and between now and then, we're going to be meeting the people behind the most innovative developments in the movies that are up for the awards. and we start with this monster hit. whatever it takes. this show had so many challenges, i think, because it's such a pinnacle of the marvel universe. excuse me, mr hulk? yes. can we get a photo? smart hulk in particular was a real challenge because we were taking our facial animation to places we hadn't been. and to get that level of performance was definitely a real challenge. so, when they were shooting, they shot with mark ruffalo in place as smart hulk. he would wear a motion capture suit and also some head—mounted cameras to capture his facial performance. so that meant, once we got the shots turned over to us, we had a good amount of reference to get started with. although we had this amazing performance for mark, if you put 100% mark onto smart hulk, it wouldn't look like smart hulk. it would look like mark ruffalo

pretending to be smart hulk. so there was some amount of refinement we had to do to find that performance, to find the character. we used some machine learning techniques to enable us to capture his performance very quickly off of that footage and put it onto our initial model. we tried to get that really finessed human performance, which is probably one of the hardest things to do in cg. something else we took from our machine learning information was some of the really small micro movements. although we did most of it hand—animation, it was very important we could take these tiny little micro movements, like just very small bits of eyebrow movement, cheek movements, just really subtle so you can feed it back over the top of the hand animation to really capture the performance. the biggest problem, i think, we faced was actually the quantum suits that the avengers wear because, when they shot it — way back before infinity war — there was no design for the suits. so nobody was wearing a suit and no suit was ever built. so we had to work out several things. one is how we were going to place everybody‘s costumes? because they were being shot

in whatever costume the avenger happen to usually wear. in some cases, that created quite a few problems. some of the costumes that they were wearing have very high collars, so the newer suits that they would've been wearing wouldn't be covering all of that costume. so there'd be bits of their neck would be visible, which we have to recreate either in cg or in painting it back. and in some shots... the establishing shot when they first walked into the hangar altogether was actually shot with stand—ins. they've done the lines... we ended up replacing their heads as well. sometimes using a double, sometimes using pieces of plate from other shots. we could find a nice side view, stick that in because it was quite wide. but the other thing to bear in mind is in these shots, because we had to integrate the lighting on the suits into the plate as well, we built a full cg hangar — which we needed anyway... there was a green screen behind them, where the windows are. and even though the green screen

was outside the windows, we had to replace all the windows simply because we needed the reflections of what we are putting into the building anyway. so by the end of the day, the only thing that's actually left in those shots from what was filmed, is their heads and part of the ceiling. so we replaced the hangar as well. so, actually there was one shot in particularfor ant—man right at the beginning of the time travel testing. ant—man introduces the quantum van. that shot was originally in a different sequence, shot in a different part of the hangar, so the background was all wrong. so we had to take that and completely change it and change the environment, change the van. and then it was like, "oh, he's also in the wrong costume." so we ended up replacing his costume as well to put him into the ant—man quantum suit that he was wearing for the rest of the sequence. so that was another sort of last—minute, single—shot design of a costume to match what it was exactly like in the rest of the shots. people like to see the big flashy effects.

the satisfaction comes, a lot of the time, from doing work, good work, that nobody realises is there. so clever, isn't it? and we'll look at the secrets behind another 0scar nominee next week. that's it, though, for the moment from la. we will be back here in a few weeks' time for the academy awards. and during this week, why not follow us on social media, on youtube, facebook, instagram or twitter? your choice. we're at... thanks for watching and we'll see you soon. hello. after a mainly dry start to the weekend, a spell of rain east across the uk on sunday. this is how saturday shaping up.

it does like there will be a zone of brightest guys just pushing further north across england and wales for a time during the day, but then thicker cloud comes back with some drizzly rain in places. chance of a bit of drizzle for northern ireland and into scotland. albrektsson mentors northwest scotland, turning more persistent later in the day. quite a windy day here. a male day elsewhere. turning breezy. this weather system begins to move in. during sunday, it will push further east. outbreaks of more substantial rain, rather frost free start on sunday. there will be some brighter spots behind the rain, the sun will really come out in northern ireland, in scotland, brighter after the rain. a breezy day turning colder as the rain clears.

this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk, on pbs in america or around the globe. i'mjames reynolds — our top stories... china reports more deaths from the respiratory coronavirus as the first cases in europe are confirmed. the search for survivors continues after a powerful earthquake strikes eastern turkey. at least 18 people are dead. democrats conclude opening arguments in president trump's impeachment trial with a warning "he is a threat to democracy". president trump, by such conduct has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security and the constitution, if allowed to remain in office. and, the massive swarms of desert locusts threatening the food