this is bbc news. the headlines: president putin has warned that russia will respond immediately to any country attempting to interfere in the war in ukraine, saying he has all the tools to respond. that's after the european union accused moscow of economic blackmail and of escalating the war by cutting off russian gas supplies to poland and bulgaria. despite president putin's warning to the west, britain's foreign secretary, liz truss, has said western allies must "double down" in their support for ukraine. in the clearest indication yet of the uk's aims for the conflict, she said russian forces must be pushed out of the whole ukraine. india struggles under the weight of an extreme heatwave, as firefighters tackle flames at a huge landfill site near delhi which is releasing toxic fumes

into the air. prime minister narendra modi says his country is getting too hot, too early in the year. now on bbc news, it's time for click. this week, another chance to see if video games can play the pain away. the vfx that made bond make that bend, and there was this enterprising young fellow. in the shadow of battersea power station in london,

the future of mankind hangs in the balance. our two heroes are on a desperate mission to save the earth from being wiped out by an asteroid. hang on, you're bashing some boxes around now. what's this? ooh! 0h! 0k, well done. bit near. 0h! and quite frankly, they're being hopeless about it. do you want some nitrogen? can i throw it to you? 0k, i've got no feet. yeah, throw it to me. all right. look, they you go. can i catch it? got it. 0k, well, what am i actually doing with it now? erm, i don't know. hang onto it, i suppose. well, that's why you've given it to me, cos you don't know what to do with it. this is a vr escape room in space where the objects you pick up and drop bounce around in 06. it really shows how vr can create experiences that would be impossible to achieve in a real escape room. but itjust looks like any landmass with some sea next to it. yeah, but there's a long... i don't recognise the curve. there's a long wiggly bit over here, right?

yeah, although, what's funny, of course, is that escape rooms started online, then they moved to the real world and now they're becoming this sort of next—gen hybrid thing. true, not that it matters as, right now, i think we're running out of time. both scream lara chuckles 0h, we didn't manage to save the world. i'm sorry. yeah, you've all gone the way of the dinosaurs, i'm afraid. apologies. we've known for some time now that video games can help alleviate stress and anxiety and only last year, we looked at a device called the mdoloris, which is usually used by doctors to see whether patients who are sedated are feeling pain or not. yeah, they've also been conducting other studies using the machine, specifically with kids who have cancer, to find out whether playing video games could do more for them than just be fun. omar mehtab has been finding out more. er, nervous. i'm pumped, i'm excited,

but i'm a little bit nervous. we've arrived at the hospital la paz in madrid and we're here to meet the kids fighting cancer. hello. omar laughs why is that? well, it's because i'm about to play some video games with them. this here is my new friend marco. how long have you been in the hospital? omar laughs pokemon? yes. yeah? i have pokemon as well. i've got my pokemon... can i get my pokemon? can i show him? you want to have a play? go for it, man. check out my pokemon. now, we're notjust here playing games for the sake of it, rather it's said to reduce the pain that these kids feel. a trial at this hospital has been studying these children, who often feel pain due to their condition, and the adverse effects of chemotherapy.

the mdoloris machine. it monitors a person's autonomic nervous system, which unconsciously regulates body processes, such as breathing, blood pressure and heart rate, so doctors can, at a glance, see the level of distress a patient may be in. the lower the number out of100, the more they are in, it quantifies pain. we looked at this machine last year where doctors said it helped assess how much pain someone was actually in, so they could administer the right amount of painkillers, so as not to over or under dose them. and it was critical in treating covid patients as well. but now, they're using it to try and prove one of the most popular theories around. there have been various studies over the years looking into the relationship between gaming and pain, and by using this machine, they can objectively say when someone is feeling more or less pain. but why are video games having this effect? now, this trial has been

peer—reviewed and published in the journal of medical internal research. they had 20 kids in total, playing video games for an average of 2.3 hours every day, and that was enough to bring about less pain and less need for morphine, showing how effective this non—medical, non—invasive hobby may be. ok, me personally, i easily get vexed with video games if things don't go my way, but for these kids, not so much. the theory is that adolescent kids can gain more pleasure from video games than any other age range. i imagine he's been in pain...

look, a medal! i imagine he's been in pain, but right now that doesn't matter. he's just fully absorbed, and right now, all this is all he cares about. daniel here, for instance, was one of the first trialists and immediately saw the benefits. translation: and it all began when this psp was handed to a patient, and they similarly noticed how affixed the kid was to it.

now they want to take their findings further. so maybe one day, we'll find playstations, xboxes, and nintendo switches become standard in hospitals. but until then, maybe i'll also do a bit of gaming when i'm not

feeling too great. after a three year long covid enforced hiatus, south by southwest and its creative crowd are once more converging upon the lone star state. south by, as it's affectionately known by those in the know, is something intangible, something indefinable, dare i say, fluid? at once, it's a film, music, art and technology, well, party, really. it's neat, in a world that is largely fractured and divided, to see a lot of different cultures coming together, meeting each other, making new connections. so much of what we do here is content creativity. but even more so, inspiration. now in its 35th year, on everyone's mind is, what's next? unsurprisingly, the big talk this year is all about something beginning

with the letter m, how it's going to affect entertainment and storytelling in the future. our relationship with reality is fundamentally changing, and because we have these ways that are augmenting or transporting us and we are actually creating memories that become a part of who we are, even though they are not real, and that is actually a sort of profound idea when you start to think about that. disney's ilmxlab has been crafting mixed reality experiences to expand its star wars and marvel franchises for years, but now it's focused on bringing the magic to your everyday. people want to be creators, they don't want to just be consumers or participants. audiences are getting more sophisticated and their expectations are increasing, and they do want this connected storytelling. they want a sense of persistence. they want a sense that

if they have done one thing that another experience knows that they have and that it's somehow enriched that, you know, that we're creating dynamic worlds, and that they have a role in those worlds. behold, the illustrious palace. vr theatre troupe the ferryman collective is premiering their latest interactive show, gumball dreams. 25 cents and unfortunately, i have no cash on me. it's kind of like a virtual version of secret cinema, but the stage here is made of pixels, and the live performers are robots and blue aliens. it's a beautiful way of interacting with actors from wherever you are in the world. we have actors all over the world. we have somebody in thailand, in new york and la, and they interact with people from, like, ruralareas who've never experienced immersive theatre before. so you don't actually have to leave your house to get to the theatre, you put on a headset instead of driving there. he's got a rubik's cube. he's very happy with that. you can do things in vr

that you could never do in real life. you can make a book turn into a house right in front of your eyes, or travel through time and space into one room to the next. you know, you can get as much out of it as you put into it. i must stay behind for- i have many preparations. no! off you go. don't leave me! south by is also a major film festival showing 76 world premieres, attracting chequebooks, eyeballs, nicolas cage and nicolas cage's eyeballs. start—up legion m is capitalising on this with their film scout app, which gauges authentic sentiment from real movie buffs. this is an entirely new way to finance and produce and develop films. if you think about it, fans hold all the power in the entertainment industry because it's our wallets and eyeballs that literally pay for everything, every dollar, everything. the reason that netflix and disney are worth the hundreds of billions of dollars is because of the fans

that are that are footing the bills. our philosophy is that, as much as possible, we want to harness, and leverage the wisdom of the crowd, so that we can make decisions based on data as opposed to just gut intuition from a couple of the executives. from apps to flying qr codes made from drones to magic musical carpets to tokens of the non—fungible variety, tech is being used across the arts here in countless ways, changing the way stories are told and consumed. and as the curtain falls on south by, the countdown to next year begins. that was nick in texas. now the film scout app being used at south by southwest has a rather special shareholder behind the scenes. he is a starship captain, an admiral, and these days, he's also an actual spaceman. it's william shatner. bill, welcome to click, sir. well, thank you. my goodness, i'm so happy to be here. how hard is it to get a film or a tv series greenlit

and commissioned in hollywood? it is difficult because when anybody says yes, everybody'sjob is in suspension. i wrote a series of books called tech war some years ago, i directed a pilot film. it's sold as a series. it lasted a year, and now i'm attempting to go with a very well known animation house to sell it as an animated series. and it's tough. i've got a game show that's so unique, and i'm trying to sell that. so one thing after another, it's very difficult. it's almost impossible to sell anything... even with you attached? wow. notjust me, but people who are, you know, i mean, it's a whole area that people think they know how to do it,

and maybe they do, because they've had some success, but on the other hand, they might've been friends with that guy, and the guy said well you seem to know what you're doing, so i'll buy it. i mean, it'sjust loaded with...unknowns. starting from the beginning, you need the money to make the movie. mm—hm. now that's where legion m comes in, because they're now... their, er... their basis is, "let's ask people to contribute money "to making a film," they'll own a minute part of it based on their small contribution, which is what i believe everybody wants.

we want everybody to contribute a little tiny sum of money. they then have a little tiny partnership in the movie, and they also can express their opinion of the movie. and the movie is being made by supreme professionals being guided by the opinion of this large group of people whojoin in on film scout or legion m, those apps. i guess you can listen to the opinion of the people who are contributing, but i guess you also don't have to follow their opinion if you know better. you know, is it always a good idea to follow the opinion of everyone? the premise is we don't know better. who knows better? if 1,000 people say, "that's funny," and you think, "that's not funny," you have to think, "that must be funny," because 1,000 people thought it was funny. 10,000,100,000 people say, "you know, what we're

interested in is x," and you think, "x is not interesting," you have to bend. it must be... i think it must be unusual for someone who's been in the business as long as you to still be that open to public opinion. i would have thought that most people would kind of think they know it all by the time they've worked that long. that's where you gentrify. that's where you become so rigid that you think, "i know at all," and then you're dead because you don't know it. that's the final evolution of me at any rate. you finally go, "oh, i know how to do it. no, i don't." and finally, you come to whether it's sad or glad, the fact that i really don't know anything. and now you become open, not only to laughter and tears, but open to the leaves on the trees. i mean, now you become... ..almost, you know, show business then becomes almost spiritual in a way.

i've met a number of astronauts through this programme. they said they saw earth from up there and it changed them, and ijust wondered whether you'd had the same experience. i was filled with grief because i saw how vulnerable... ..all of this is and not only saw it, we look around us at things that are falling apart in nature because of man, we're destroying this incredibly beautiful... this earth is filled... everything about earth is beautiful, and it's evolved over five billion years. it's taken five billion years of, "oh, this not working — i'll go onto this." you ever think about nature doing a display the way... ..the way people are trying to sell... ..entertaining the vehicles? so nature is saying, "all right. let's see. "maybe this will go."

and nature does... and the supreme nature doesn't buy it. "no, that's not going to work." so nature's filled with things that are not working, and it goes away and another thing takes it. "oh, that works." and the show business of nature and it's all beautiful because it's all evolved and we're bloody destroying it, and itjust filled me with such grief. it took me so long to get... ..to be able to handle it. and that's where i'm at. william shatner, what a legend. i know. you know the best thing about that interview? what? he turned up early, and he talked for longer than he said he would. oh, who wouldn't want to hang out with you? well, from one movie icon to an iconic movie. so, over the last few weeks, we've been looking at some of the films nominated for best visual effects at this year's oscars, and this week it is the turn ofjames bond. did you know that no time to die is the first bond movie that's been nominated in the best visual effects category in 43 years? moonraker was the last

one in 1979. yes, of course. and here is some of the amazing work that went into the film. now your enemy is my enemy. his name is safin. and what does he want? revenge, me. the bond films have a rich heritage of shooting all of their extraordinary action for real. and this film was absolutely no different. there was visual effects in it, but they were not up front and centre. so, for instance, in the norway lake sequence, the production actually went to norway and they filmed on a real lake, a real frozen lake in norway. but as with any production, when you shoot throughout the day, the footage looks different from shot to shot. there was kind of one or maybe two shots, which everyone was happy with the lighting conditions. we had a task to try and match the lighting across all of the shots.

and in order to do that, we simulated a cg world where the lighting was exactly the same. and then we used a number of techniques to copy and mimic what we were seeing in the computer. so rather than... we still used the photography and built on top of it rather than replacing it whole hog. but we used the simulation to tell us what that should look like. the director, cary fukunaga, is very keen to keep as much of the stuff that he had shot as he could. that included the people, that included the buildings, the trees even, but the trees didn't have snow on. so each tree had to be, particularly for the close—up trees, it had to be modelled in cgi to look exactly like the trees that were there. we put snow on them digitally, but then lifted the digital snow off and put them on top of the real trees that were in the plate.

we had, you know, an amazing special effects team that really did, and stunt team, that really did jump land rovers through the air. and when we needed to replace things like that for lighting or for filling in the background, we kept exactly that stunt. so on a james bond film, no—one really wants to resort to cgi stunts and things like that. so they really do capture everything in camera. but when they, for sort of timing reasons, they take a chunk out of the middle of a chase, suddenly, the continuity of where those vehicles are and where they need to be sort of goes out the window. that's when we do come in and we find a plate that maybe has got the toyota in it, which is bond's car, but it doesn't have the land rovers there, so had a motorbike. so we'll erase the motorbike, but we'll put the land rovers in and that's the kind of work that we are doing. it's not very flashy

work to put in the grass that was completely chewed up by the stunt team and to replace that, but it does need to be... it does need to look really accurate and the attention to detail that our environments team had to go to model the tufts of the grass that matched the scottish highlands where they were shooting. unless we go to those sort of lengths, you don't end up believing it and it all feels like a bit of a fudge and we're not interested in fudging it in, you know, 2022. not that long to go now till the oscars. i think the question everyone is asking is, "can dune do there what it did at the baftas recently?" what's your prediction? i'm team spider—man.

ooh, interesting. anyway, that is it from us for this week. as ever, you can keep up with the team on social media. find us on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter... thanks for watching. we'll see you soon. bye— bye! hello again. many parts of scotland, northern ireland, western england and wales had some decent spells of sunshine, but across central and eastern england, we had some of this cloud yesterday. this is called stratocumulus. now, through the afternoon, in hastings, that cloud began to break up, and because it's a thin cloud, it's only 200—300 metres thick, above that, you've got clear blue sunny skies, and once it starts to go, it can go very, very quickly, so it was a lovely end to the day here. now, i'm telling you about that because that's what this type

of cloud is, running in off the north sea, affecting parts of eastern england and the midlands at the moment. now, that is going to be prone to thinning and breaking up a bit more, i think, as we go through thursday. but with clearer skies out towards the west, it's cold at the moment. we've got some frost to watch out for, heading into the first part of the morning. now, across southern england, a better chance of seeing some sunshine. should have some sunshine, as well, across much of the northwest of the uk, and i suspect this cloud will tend to get eroded, so the areas that are most likely to keep it into the afternoon, well, probably east midlands, lincolnshire, norfolk and suffolk, but otherwise, i think most of you will see some sunshine. dry for many, an odd shower for northern scotland, an odd shower in southwest england, but in the best of the sunshine, we're looking at highs up to 16 degrees. it's a similar kind of day, really, on friday. again, we start off with some of that patchy cloud coming in off the north sea, but for many of us, it's a dry day, again with some spells of sunshine, and starting to turn just a little bit warmer as well. 17 the top temperature in cardiff and glasgow as well. after this lengthy

spell of dry weather, caused by this high pressure, we're actually going to see some changes into the weekend. it starts to weaken, to allow this weather front to move in from the north and west. so, saturday, although england and wales is looking at another fine day, with some further spells of sunshine, much thicker cloud than we've seen all week will be heading into scotland and northern ireland, with outbreaks of rain, especially through the afternoon, the rain turning heavier and steadierfor a time. temperatures, though, out of the rain, still around 15 or 16 degrees, which will feel pleasant given the light winds. through saturday night and into sunday, the rain moves southwards across england and wales, but as it does so, it will weaken, so it will turn lighter and patchier. temperatures on sunday should reach a high of around 11; or 15 degrees, with the best of the drier and brighter weather in scotland and northern ireland.

welcome to bbc news. i'm rich preston. our top stories: president putin cuts gas supplies and declares russia will respond immediately to any country attempting to interfere in ukraine. translation: if they create threats for us, threats - of a strategic nature, our retaliation, our counterstrike, will be instantaneous. despite that warning, the uk's foreign secretary says russian forces must be pushed out of the whole of ukraine. we can't be complacent. the fate of ukraine hangs in the balance. another desperate appeal from a ukrainian commander trapped inside a steel works

in the city of mariupol, he says people will die if they're not rescued.