Droid story reveals future history

A CHARISMATIC robot called NE31 will help lead the North East’s technology revolution.

Created by design studio Qurios, NE31 stars in a 10-minute film intended to excite even the driest industrialist to speculate on what the year 2109 may hold.

The studio was founded in Hartlepool by husband and wife team Neil and Diane Bushnell, and Newcastle’s Dean Films. “Chris Chapman from Dean Films came up with the idea of a newsreel from 100 years in the future looking back at the revolution that happens now,” explains Neil. “NE31 was part of Chris’s postcode.”

Appropriately for an android helping the North East gain an economic march on the rest of Britain, the postcode covers Jarrow. Neil’s own vision of the future “won’t have quite so many flying cars”, he says.

But he was surprised to find other scenes – including the one in which a businessman unfolds a digital moving image newspaper from his pocket – weren’t so far-fetched.

“I was quite ignorant of a lot of the stuff going on in the North East, which isn’t a long way down the line,” said Neil.