We’re excited to introduce the five participants of our Animation Development Lab. They've been busy developing bold, original ideas for short-form animation, starting from early concepts, characters, worlds and visual ideas and shaping them into strong short film projects.

We can’t wait to see how their projects evolve – until then, meet the writers:

Fadumo is an actor and artist whose work spans screen, theatre and interactive media. She began her career on screen during her time at university before transitioning into theatre, working across the UK on projects exploring comedy, drama, black history, science fiction, and games.

In 2023 she performed on the Crucible stage as part of Utopia Theatre’s All Our Goals. Her credits also include Storm Cloud 2024 (based on a John Ruskin 1884 speech); Intrapology 2024-25; Sheeko Laga Tagay, part of Doc/Fest 2025; Delta Force 2025; Rule Britannia (working title). 

Alongside acting practice, Hassan had exhibition in Paris back in the summer and has also worked as a dramaturg (script consultant), Assistant Director and Producer. She is passionate about representation and champions bold stories that challenge the status quo.

Georgia is a stop-motion animator and puppet maker based in Liverpool. Her most recent animation Divination Dave was a dark comedy commissioned by New Creatives North for BBC iPlayer: it won Best Animation at the BFI Future Film Festival in 2022. Since then she’s been storyboarding and building puppets for her next stop motion adventure, RUBBERLEG.

Olga is an animator and artist from Moscow. She moved to the UK in 2020, completed a master's in Communication Design at Northumbria University in 2021, and has continued to grow creative and community roots in Newcastle.

She works as a lead animator at Roots and Wings, a non-profit design company in Ouseburn, developing short-form animations for third-sector organisations and community initiatives. She specialises in frame-by-frame animation, After Effects, and digital illustration.

She shares her home with her husband, who is also a 3D animator and artist, and their 13-year-old toy poodle, Kiwi. She loves nature and exploring trails, music, parties, and collecting trinkets. Her summers are often spent in Albania, where her family now live.

Cole is a multi-media artist of Caribbean and British descent currently working in Sheffield. He uses shadow puppetry, film, illustration, sound, photography and animation to explore the black British experience through myth, histories and archive materials.

He creates otherworldly stories from very familiar materials of paper and card, found objects, field recordings, and observational environmental photography. His creative practice is rooted in experimentation and pushing the limits of basic materials, driven by his love of the early pioneers of cinema. In contrast to traditional two dimensional shadow puppetry, Morris’ puppets are created as if torn from a graphic novel or cinematic storyboard, presented at dramatic camera angles, lighting positions, and made for dynamic movement. Morris uses screens and scenery to create a three dimensional film set in which the camera can move cinematically as it follows the performances.

Short Filmography/Exhibitions: Institution music video (2022); Spirits of Dead Buildings, for Sensoria festival (2022); Hunter 77 parts 1 & 2 (for Dig Where you stand exhibition) (2024/25); Across the Loch, animation sequences for short film (2024); The Forgotten Army (for Liverpool Museums, 2025); The Liar music video (2026).

Raised on a healthy diet of Wallace and Gromit, The Wombles, Yellow Submarine, and the Charlie Says… films, Ewan is the eternal child of his parents’ VHS tapes. He is a BFI Animation Academy alumni, using a handcrafted aesthetic to tell colourful and humorous stories.

Ewan’s animated shorts have been exhibited on the Toronto Short Film Channel, the Leeds Film Player, and the INDIs Short Film Showcase. Most recently, he has completed work on a short titled The Mole Catcher’, and was added to the Shiny Awards’ Shiny List of commercial video makers for his music video The Amber List – The Wrong.

Outside of animation, his one-act play The Elephant Suite was selected by the development team at Paines Plough to receive specialist feedback and coaching in 2021. He was selected as one of the Top 100 in Prospect100’s design competition for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In 2023 and 2024 he worked as part of a writer’s room developing a new thread of phonics titles for the Fischer Family Foundation’s Success For All program, and is credited for writing 15 classroom books and 2 online stories for older readers.

Ewan has worked on animated and illustrated projects for clients including Humanitarian Affairs Asia and the Prospect100 NFT Community for Ukraine.