Vampire
Surf Cult

Trailer, pitch, and character spots.

The self-funded trailer, the pilot pitch, the store film, and a few of the cuts that kept the cult growing between them. Tap to play with sound.

Blood Island, one short at a time.

The vertical cuts that did the recruiting: what the show is, why it isn’t a reboot, and what the island sounds like. Tap to play with sound.

Welcome to Blood Island.

Key art and frames from the animation — the palette, the cast, and the never-ending night.

Merch that funds the show.

“This isn’t just merch.” Every dollar goes back into the pilot and the artists behind it. A designer toy, a plush, a comic, a record, and an apparel line, each one a piece of the world.

Punk washed ashore.

Of everything that drifts onto Blood Island from the human world, nothing hit harder than punk rock. So the show has a sound before it has a full season. Original music written for the world, surf-punk at its core, inspired by the Surf Punks and the cassette-deck energy of an ’80s beach town after dark, recorded alongside the self-funded trailer and released as Vampire Surf Cult, the band.

The music became product, too. The Live on Blood Island “live set” was pressed to a limited run of 50 twelve-inch records with jacket art by Karmavoid (sold out) and a cassette, and the catalogue lives on Spotify and every major streaming platform. A soundtrack fans can wear, spin, and stream long before episode one airs.

Launch an original IP with no studio.

Adult animation is dominated by remakes, sequels, and studio pipelines, and the outlook for new indie shows has been bleak for a while. Vampire Surf Cult had to prove three things at once: that the world was rich enough to sustain a series, that an audience wanted it badly enough to fund it, and that the idea could carry a brand beyond the screen.

The constraint was total ownership: no one “messing with the vision,” but also no budget, no distribution, and no fanbase on day one.

Build the world first. Bring the audience along.

We started with the world rather than the medium. Blood Island, its cast, its villains, its rules. Only then did animation become the main way to tell the story. To prove it was real we self-funded a $25,000 trailer and an original soundtrack before asking anyone for a dollar.

Then we treated the audience as co-conspirators. I ran the early Instagram growth myself, learned the algorithm the slow way, and leaned into the one message that struck a nerve: this is not a remake or a sequel. Behind-the-scenes art, lore drops, and a lot of replying to comments turned followers into fans. Three of them got Thrash tattoos before the pilot even aired.

Finally we took the indie route and crowdfunded the pilot. Drawing on my product background, I designed the campaign rewards (the Thrash resin figure fans went wild for) so the campaign sold a world, not just a video.

Saturday-morning cartoon, after dark.

The pitch is Futurama meets The Lost Boys: the charm of a 1990s Saturday-morning cartoon with the language and themes of an adult sitcom. The visual system follows. A dripping neon-green wordmark on black, a purple-night palette lit by moons and neon, and Blood Island itself, where ancient ruins collide with 80s and 90s surf-punk culture.

The cast carries the brand: Cody, the amnesiac human; Thrash, the 100-year-old slacker vampire born to vampire parents; Feebz, the rational caretaker; Mags, the werewolf and spiritual anchor; and Eclipse, a short-tempered Shred Lord in a gothic cathedral castle. That character-forward system is what lets the world extend cleanly into toys, vinyl, comics, and apparel.