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Prince William Goes Dragon Boating in Singapore Ahead of Earthshot Prize Ceremony 

Britain's Prince William (C) takes part in a dragon boat practice with members of The British Dragons club at the Kallang River in Singapore, 06 November 2023. (EPA)
Britain's Prince William (C) takes part in a dragon boat practice with members of The British Dragons club at the Kallang River in Singapore, 06 November 2023. (EPA)
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Prince William Goes Dragon Boating in Singapore Ahead of Earthshot Prize Ceremony 

Britain's Prince William (C) takes part in a dragon boat practice with members of The British Dragons club at the Kallang River in Singapore, 06 November 2023. (EPA)
Britain's Prince William (C) takes part in a dragon boat practice with members of The British Dragons club at the Kallang River in Singapore, 06 November 2023. (EPA)

Britain’s Prince William took to the waters in Singapore for a morning of dragon boating Monday, ahead of activities for the annual Earthshot Prize awards aimed at promoting solutions for the planet’s environmental threats.

Donning a life vest and a black cap, the Prince of Wales sat in a long narrow boat as he paddled with athletes from the British Dragons club on the Kallang river. Working in pairs, William and the other 19 paddlers rowed vigorously to the steady beat of a drummer standing in the bow.

His boat triumphed in a brief race with another boat captained by British High Commissioner Kara Owen. It was not the first time for William, an avid sportsman who tried his hand at dragon boating with his wife, Kate, the Princess of Wales, during a tour of Canada in 2011.

Dragon boat racing, originating from China, can be traced back nearly 2,000 years before it became a modern international sport in 1976.

“I was lucky enough to be sitting next to him, and he is just a really nice guy,” said Laura Greenwood, a British expat who is a member of the British Dragons. “He has dragon boated before, so he felt kind of confident in what he was doing ... It was quite fast pace, so he kept up really well.”

William, 41, arrived Sunday ahead of the annual Earthshot Prize awards ceremony, the first to be held in Asia. William and his Royal Foundation charity launched the global environment competition in 2020 to promote innovative solutions and technologies to combat global warming and repair the planet.

William is to address a star-studded award ceremony Tuesday, where winners will be named in five categories: nature protection, clean air, ocean revival, waste elimination, and climate change.

Each winner will get 1 million pounds ($1.2 million) to help them scale up their projects for wider global reach. All 15 finalists, representing six continents and selected from 1,300 nominees this year, will receive help in expanding their projects.

Actors Hannah Waddingham and Sterling K. Brown will co-host the event, which will also be attended by wildlife conservationist Robert Irwin and celebrities including Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and actors Lana Condor and Nomzamo Mbatha.

The prize’s name refers to the late President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “moonshot” speech, which challenged Americans to reach the moon by the end of that decade. That inspired the prince and his partners to set a similar goal for finding solutions to environmental problems by 2030.

The inaugural ceremony was held in London in 2021 and the second in Boston last year.

William’s office at Kensington Palace has said Singapore was chosen to host this year’s ceremony because of its role as a “hub for innovation” in Southeast Asia.

During his four-day visit, his first to the city-state since 2012, William will also call on Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and meet with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

William also plans to attend the United for Wildlife summit, featuring representatives of law enforcement agencies, conservation groups and corporations working to combat trade in illegal wildlife products, estimated at $20 billion annually.

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Tim Burton Talks about His Dread of AI as an Exhibition of His Work Opens in London

A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
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Tim Burton Talks about His Dread of AI as an Exhibition of His Work Opens in London

A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)
A member of staff poses at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP)

The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits – all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.

But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.

Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters “really disturbed me.”

“It wasn’t an intellectual thought — it was just an internal, visceral feeling,” Burton told reporters during a preview of “The World of Tim Burton” exhibition at London’s Design Museum. “I looked at those things and I thought, ‘Some of these are pretty good.’ ... (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside.”

Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because “once you can do it, people will do it.” But he scoffed when asked if he’d use the technology in this work.

“To take over the world?” he laughed.

The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.

“I wasn’t, early on, a very verbal person,” Burton said. “Drawing was a way of expressing myself.”

Decades later, after films including “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Beetlejuice,” his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.

London is the exhibition’s final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in the British capital, where Burton has lived for a quarter century.

The show includes early drawings and oddities, including a competition-winning “crush litter” sign a teenage Burton designed for Burbank garbage trucks. There’s also a recreation of Burton’s studio, down to the trays of paints and “Curse of Frankenstein” mug full of pencils.

Alongside hundreds of drawings, there are props, puppets, set designs and iconic costumes, including Johnny Depp’s “Edward Scissorhands” talons and the black latex Catwoman costume worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in “Batman.”

“We had very generous access to Tim’s archive in London, stuffed full of thousands of drawings, storyboards from stop-motion films, sketches, character notes, poems,” said exhibition curator Maria McLintock. “And how to synthesize such a wide ranging and meandering career within one exhibition was a fun challenge — but definitely a challenge.”

Seeing it has not been a wholly fun experience for Burton, who said he’s unable to look too closely at the items on display.

“It’s like seeing your dirty laundry put on the walls,” he said. “It’s quite amazing. It’s a bit overwhelming.”

Burton, whose long-awaited horror-comedy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opened at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflix’ Addams Family-themed series “Wednesday.”

These days he is a major Hollywood director whose American gothic style has spawned an adjective – “Burtoneqsue.” But he still feels like an outsider.

“Once you feel that way, it never leaves you,” he said.

“Each film I did was a struggle,” he added, noting that early films like “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” from 1985 and “Beetlejuice” in 1988 received some negative reviews. “It seems like it was a pleasant, fine, easy journey, but each one leaves its emotional scars.”

McLintock said Burton “is a deeply emotional filmmaker."

“I think that’s what drew me to his films as a child,” she said. "He really celebrates the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So it’s been quite a weird but fun experience spending so much time in his brain and his creative process.

“His films are often called dark,” she added. “I don’t agree with that. And if they are dark, there’s a very much a kind of hope in the darkness. You always want to hang out in the darkness in his films.”