Bridging the gap between creative and tech
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Some see them as polar opposites, but more people than you might think are moving between the creative and technology industries; using the skills from one to further success in the other. But how easy is it to cross between art and engineering?
David Harper meets Jan Harlan, who started his career in the embryonic IT industry of the 1960s. The precision and planning skills he developed would help him in a 30-year career as a producer for one of the world’s greatest film directors: Stanley Kubrick.
David also speaks to Thomas Dolby, famous as a pop star in the 1980s synthpop scene, who later headed to Silicon Valley - using his enthusiasm for emerging technology to create new opportunities, including an infamous mobile phone ringtone.
And we hear from Lyndsey Scott, an actress, former model and computer coder who develops iOS apps while simultaneously juggling an acting career. Despite her successes, she sometimes finds it difficult to be taken seriously in a male-dominated technology business.
Presenter: David Harper Producers: David Harper and Victoria Hastings
(Image: Lyndsey Scott. Credit: Paul Smith)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Global Gixote is the new podcast from BBC monitoring, the BBC team tracking and analyzing media in 100 languages. |
| 0:09.1 | We're lifting the language barrier, showing you the world through the eyes of its media, |
| 0:14.1 | where conflicting narratives are competing to influence your views. |
| 0:18.4 | Search for the Global Gixo wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:24.0 | Creatives, artists and producers. We think of them as a mystical God-given talent, shaping the |
| 0:29.3 | look and sound of the world we live in, but should we be just as appreciative of the architects |
| 0:33.5 | of technology. |
| 0:44.7 | And should we be more open to the fact that creatives can sometimes be just as talented at developing the tech in our lives, |
| 0:49.4 | and the engineers of this world might have more of an artistic side than you might realize? |
| 0:56.4 | Well, to find out more, I sat down with a man called Jan Harlan in a stylish book-filled study next to a crackling fire on a chilly winter afternoon. |
| 1:01.8 | Jan was an essential part of critically acclaimed films like a clockwork orange, |
| 1:06.0 | the shining and eyes wide shut, with the much revered director Stanley Kubrick. He started his career, though, |
| 1:12.9 | working in the embryonic IT industry of the 1960s. It was then big tapes and at big discs, |
| 1:20.5 | and it was really very different from today. I was really, in the end, working on paper tape |
| 1:26.4 | machines to be fed into an IBM 1401 computer. I was really in the end working on paper tape machines to be fed into an IBM 401 computer. |
| 1:31.3 | I was always interested in business and in figures and in planning and in organizing things. |
| 1:37.0 | And that also led me to the film industry because I did the same thing there. |
| 1:41.4 | You knew Stanley Kubrick before. |
| 1:42.8 | I knew him for five years already. He suggested |
| 1:45.4 | to work with him for one year to go to Romania or Napoleon. And then the film fell apart. |
| 1:52.0 | This was Napoleon. Napoleon fell apart. It was never done. And I got along with him very much. |
| 1:57.6 | And he said, oh, well, why don't you work on something else and blah blah blah |
... |
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