Award-winning creator of Netflix series among top speakers at 2025 UoG Fine Lines Festival

The award-winning creator of the Netflix animated fantasy horror comedy series DeadEnd: Paranormal Park is among the line-up of speakers at University of Gloucestershire’s 2025 Fine Lines Festival.

The free public event will enable visitors to attend talks, screenings and workshops, and meet UK and international animators, illustrators and games designers – including University students and recent graduates – and find out more about careers available within the creative industries.

Best known for the DeadEndia trilogy of graphic novels and the Netflx adaptation, DeadEnd: Paranormal Park, Hamish Steele won the Russ Manning Promising Newcomer Award at the 2018 Eisner Awards at the San Diego Comic-Con.

A showrunner, director and writer, his work also includes the adult graphic novel Pantheon: The True Story of the Egyptian Deities and the webcomic Croc and Roll.

Among the speakers joining Hamish are award-winning animation director Katy Wang, whose clients have included Netflix, Penguin Books and YouTube. Modelmaker and puppet film director Cat Johnston also joins the line-up – her two decades in stop motion animation includes working with the Oscar-winning Aardman Animations, at Laika Studios on Coraline and Paranorman, and on music videos for Coldplay and Radiohead.

Led by the University’s School of Creative Arts, the Fine Lines Festival will also feature a comics and illustration market with more than 80 stallholders from the worlds of comics, illustration and animation showcasing and selling their work.

The festival will take place at Park Campus, which is currently benefiting from major investment as it transforms into the University’s Creative Campus, complete with new studio, workshop and gallery spaces.

Being held on Saturday, 10 May 2025 (11am-5.30pm), the event is free to attend and no booking is required. Visitors should simply turn up and follow the signs.

Celebration of illustrators and animators

Organiser, Seb Burnett, lecturer on the BA (Hons) Illustration and BA (Hons) Animation programmes at the University, said: “We’re really proud to be hosting the 2025 Fine Lines Festival and are absolutely thrilled that Hamish Steele, Katy Wang and Cat Johnston are supporting the event as guest speakers. I’m a huge fan of the work they create and the world’s they invent.

“We’re looking forward to providing visitors with an inspiring and informative look into visual storytelling within the creative industries, including special insights into how animation studios work. There will also be opportunities to meet professional artists and creators, and guests from publishing companies.

“The festival is a celebration of illustrators and animators, including our own students and graduates, that will help to build a creative community around image-making and storytelling.

“Having worked as an illustrator, run my own animation studio and made games, I have experience of the significant crossover between the subjects and how much successful collaborative working there is in these areas.”

Anna Hobbs, Associate Head of the School of Creative Arts, said: “We are incredibly proud of our creative community and the work they produce on campus. We are thrilled to be able to showcase it and offer a place of connection for our students, the community and the creative industry as we are preparing to launch our Creative Campus in September.”

Main image: Visitors to the 2024 Fine Lines Festival at the University