The screenplay by Ramsey was written as a spec script, but was quickly purchased by Paramount, more than happy to allow Ramsey to also serve as director — a decision no doubt made easier by the fact that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won the Acadmy Award for Best Animated Film.
Blood Count is being described as a "period vampire thriller." So far there has been virtually nothing released about the film's plot, although according to The Hollywood Reporter, it's going to be a film noir social thriller that will be set in the decade of the 1950s in Los Angeles. There are elements that are actually inspired by the life of Ramsey's father — no, not the vampire elements, but rather his background as a jazz musician.
In an interview with discussingfilm.net, Ramsey, with the success of Into the Spider-Verse ringing in his ears, noted that live action was something he was anxious to get into. "I originally got into the business with live action in mind," he said. "I had no thought of animation at all. My heroes were Coppola and Kurosawa; it was all live-action. That was my aim. And it's funny, in animation I've been lucky in that my sensibility works with the projects, like Rise of the Guardians, which was this epic fantasy film that had grounding in a kind of storybook realism ... It was something that was leaning much more heavily on influences from live-action movies, hopefully without just like blindly imitating them. So something like Rise of the Guardians or Spider-Verse later, both of those were in that thin sliver of projects that my sensibility would work in, but I've always wanted to get back to live-action and just finally climb that mountain."
Blood Count looks like it's going to provide him with that opportunity.