'Doomsweepers' Horror-Comedy Lands Flying Bark, Lightfold as Producers — SkimNews
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- Sarah Harper, director of Lego Monkie Kid and writer on Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, created the animated 'zom-com' series following janitors who go from cleaning the staff room to saving the world.
- Flying Bark, a Sydney-based 2D animation studio whose recent credits include Netflix's Stranger Things: Tales From '85 and Paramount's Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, is on board as producer.
- Lightfold, the animation studio launched in 2023 by Final Space creator Olan Rogers and producer Forrester Kane, is co-attached, and a crowdfunder round in collaboration with Lightfold has launched to raise additional financing.
- A first-look trailer dropped on YouTube alongside the funding push, with producers pitching a 'candy-coloured art direction' as a visual point of difference from traditional dark, dystopian apocalyptic content.
- Harper said the project was born in 2019 during Australia's catastrophic bushfires and the subsequent pandemic, framing the janitor protagonists as 'overlooked and underestimated' people who 'rise to the occasion' in chaos.
- Lightfold's debut project Godspeed launched on YouTube three years ago and has accumulated more than 2.2 million views, providing a track record for the fan-direct funding model now being applied to Doomsweepers.
Why it matters: Doomsweepers gives Flying Bark — a studio with major streaming credits on Stranger Things and Avatar Aang — a high-concept genre project to pitch alongside its service work, while letting Harper graduate from franchise directing to creator. The Lightfold crowdfunding structure signals that mid-budget animated series are increasingly viable outside traditional commissioner pipelines, with Lightfold's Godspeed (2.2M YouTube views) standing as a proof-of-concept for the fan-funded model.
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