The Summer Camp Pitch Bible Part 1

A look inside the original plot

Summer Camp Island Season 1-5 will air all summer long on Cartoon Network. In honour of this joyous occasion I shall be dedicating some of this summers posts to each season: the lore, the behind the scenes, recommended watch party compilations etc.

Some Summer Camp posts will be behind a pay wall so I am offering 20% off all paid subscriptions until September 1st, click here to get the deal. Thank you so much in advance for your support.

This first one is for everyone…

For those who follow my Substack but do not know about Summer Camp Island, it is an animated show about time, friendship and witches - so basically the same themes we talk about here - or to put it another way:

Today, I’m going to take you through some of the highlights of the original pitch bible and for those interested in developing your own animated TV pitch, I list every header I used in the bible at the bottom of this post.

I worked on the pitch bible for 3 months while living in New York and flew out to LA for a week to pitch it to various networks. I was repped by an agent at the time who set up the meetings for me. My palms were very sweaty during every meeting but I kept it together because part of what they’re looking for is someone who can keep it together. Basically you need to be this rainbow.

The pitch bible is 41 pages long (I was younger then) so we’re not going to even make a DENT in that today, but there are more days in our future (one hopes).

Let’s begin at the beginning.

The idea for summer camp began as a story of homesickness. People used to die of homesickness, and when I moved to New York from London I felt I was dying of it too. The thing that saved me was my friendships, so I wanted to develop a show that celebrated platonic friendship, and the insatiable appetite I had as a kid for the spooky and surreal. Sendak puts it so elegantly:

I just lived in Brooklyn, where everything was ordinary — and yet, enticing and exciting and bewildering. The magic of childhood, the strangeness of childhood, the uniqueness that makes us see things that other people don’t see. - Maurice Sendak

I grew up on a steady diet of Gremlins, The X Files, Buffy, Eerie Indiana, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Alex Mac and Casper (Christin Ricci’s version) and I lived for how they combined the comfort of the ordinary with the unknown (the MAYA Principle very much at play). Ergo, the first thing I wrote down as I was brainstorming was:

It soon started to take shape into what the pitch bible became - which one might assume was a story about going to a magical Summer Camp - but it wasn’t. It was a show about a town called Summer Camp, and the towns love of the Goddess of Pop, Cher. Here is the overview:

It continues…

What a cheery image of a banana split I put next to that last sentence.

It was around this point in rereading this pitch bible, that I realized I had not revisited this thing since 2015, and that this pitch bible was..

BLOODY AWESOME!

I still want to make this show. The ghost of banana splits past? Parental memories calling out from within the pages of last weeks newspaper? Yes please. Anyway… I digress…

The bible then got into our main characters, starting with Oscar.

This was the original design for Oscar:

But I was still attached to the Oscar in my short film Belly, so by the time he made it into the pitch bible he was very much an elephant. I wrote Oscar as anxious and introverted, because as a kid who struggled with both, I had rarely seen myself represented in television as a lead.

Oscar’s anxious introverted character and his want for things to return to how they were before became the plot of the first episode of season one, and he slowly grew into the sweet little Glowworm he is today.

The show became about kids who went to a summer camp instead of living in a town called summer camp, and as soon as all the parents leave all the spooky things beneath the surface begin to reveal themselves. Sure it makes more sense, sure it’s a more elegant plot - but there were almost no haunting echoes of parental ghost voices crying out from within newspapers in the final draft, so who wins in the end.

This is where I leave you for today, and as promised:

My Pitch Bible Layout

Overview: What is your show about.

Who is it for: A page on structure, tone and audience.

Characters: A page or so on each main character and their relationship with each other

Map: What is the birds eye view of your world - my show was very much focused on world building so this felt important, but is not vital for every pitch bible.

The World: Where is you show set and how do the characters exist within it.

Episode Example: A fully fleshed out episode idea.

Log lines: 5 or so additional episode ideas, a few sentences each.

About the Artist: A page on the creator.

Join us next time for more pitch bible highlights, including but not limited to ghosts, witches and the:

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Time is Lonely . The Ghost of Christmas Past . Alone Together