Animated Horror-Comedy 'Doomsweepers' Revealed, With Crowdfunder Live and Trailer on YouTube

A new animated horror-comedy series called Doomsweepers has been revealed, and it is taking an unusual road to the screen — a crowdfunder, a public trailer, and two studios betting on a candy-coloured apocalypse.

The series comes from creator Sarah Harper, a writer, director and showrunner whose credits include Lego's Monkie Kid franchise, Nickelodeon's Glitch Techs and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She is also the creative director of 2D projects at Flying Bark Productions, the Sydney-based animation studio producing the show, a role she was promoted to in 2022 C21 Media.

Doomsweepers is set in a mysterious research facility, where a team of misfit janitors go from cleaning the staff room to saving the world, unravelling the facility's best-kept secret. Producers describe the show's candy-coloured art direction as a deliberate point of difference from the dark, dystopian look that dominates apocalyptic storytelling. The idea was born in 2019, when Australia was battling catastrophic bushfires and soon faced the global pandemic. Harper has called the project deeply personal, inspired by the unsung heroes — everyday people who stepped up when things went wrong Deadline.

Flying Bark, a 2D animation specialist with studios in Sydney, Los Angeles and Madrid, is producing. The studio's recent productions include Netflix's Stranger Things: Tales From '85, Paramount's Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender and the original series Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia. On the other side of the partnership is Lightfold, a comics and animation studio launched in 2023 by Final Space creator Olan Rogers and producer Forrester Kane, built to develop animated projects with a direct connection to fans.

Lightfold's model is built on crowdfunding, and it has form. Its debut project, Godspeed — a crowdfunded animation pilot by Rogers — launched on YouTube three years ago and has drawn more than 2.2 million views. For Doomsweepers, Flying Bark and Lightfold released a teaser the week before Deadline's exclusive reveal, followed by a first-look trailer on YouTube to support the crowdfunding raise now live Deadline.

What makes this stand out is the financing path. Rather than waiting for a streamer or broadcaster to greenlight a pilot — the traditional route, where a network commissions a test episode before deciding whether to order a full series — the team is going straight to the audience for money. If the crowdfunder hits its target, the creators keep ownership and creative control while building a fanbase before a single full episode exists. If it does not, the project stalls in public view.

For animation fans, that means the trailer currently on YouTube is not just a promo. It is the pitch. Whether enough viewers put money behind it will decide whether Doomsweepers' janitors ever finish saving the world.