On the up

Short, sharp and highly addictive – vertical microdramas are taking the world by storm. DQ speaks to the storytellers driving this new trend to discover how the format is rewriting the rules of small-screen drama.

As the creator of iconic crime procedural CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Anthony E Zuiker is used to making one-hour network television dramas boasting expansive casts, numerous locations, eight-day shooting schedules and budgets of more than US$5m per episode.

Now, 25 years after CSI first debuted, launching an internationally acclaimed franchise, the writer and producer is immersing himself in a new storytelling format that is drawing viewers away from the small screen towards an even smaller one – by turning to vertical microdramas.

Zuiker is the first major Hollywood showrunner to shift to the format, after partnering with former Miramax CEO Bill Block on new shortform entertainment platform GammaTime. Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian are among its backers, with two Zuiker projects – The Temptress and Lust Cop – on its initial slate.

“The rule of thumb is three characters, five days of shooting, US$100,000,” he tells DQ. “It’s 30 chapters; the first six are free, 24 paid for. The challenge is always to find the best dramatic situation under the guise of the same location. You’ve got to stay put and make it work.”

The Temptress tells the story of a lawyer who went to Las Vegas and slept with the wrong woman, Zuiker explains, while Lust Cop imagines “what would happen if you had a cop that specialised in sex crimes and she wanted to sleep with the bad guy before she put him in cuffs.”

His third vertical drama will be romantic series The Road Between Us, while Zuiker is also working on festive show The Miracle on First Street.

He admits he wasn’t initially interested in microdramas. But as a creative who has often been at the forefront of new storytelling frontiers, from Yahoo! original cyber-crime series Cybergeddon in 2012 to digi-novels, Zuiker’s curiosity won out. “I like to try new things, I like to employ Californians and work with young people, and I love to write,” he says. “It gets made so fast, it’s kind of fun. I just dove in. The great part about it for me is it’s beginning, middle, end cliffhanger 30 times – and that’s it.”

GammaTime is among the latest microdrama apps to hit the market, following in the footsteps of others such as ReelShort, DramaBox, My Drama and FlareFlow that are packed with series featuring hooky, cliffhanger-fuelled episodes – often up to 70 in total – that run between one and two minutes in length.

Dismissed in some quarters after the failure of Quibi, the streamer that closed in 2020 just a few months after its launch, the shortform format is now thriving, fuelled by popularity in China and wider Asian markets. The US and other territories are now getting in on a business that is expected to generate revenue outside of China worth US$9.5bn by 2030, up from US$1.4bn last year, according to Media Partners Asia. China’s receipts alone are expected to total US$16.2bn by the same year.

Joshua Ovenshire is the creator and executive producer behind production company The Jovenshire, which has recently signed a deal with V10 Entertainment to produce 10 microdramas. He has previously worked with Smosh, Dungeons & Dragons and FailArmy, and produced reality series Love Bombing for ReelShort.

“When I was first hearing about ReelShort and what they were trying to do in the space, I found myself having the same conversations that I had back in 2008 and 2009 about YouTube,” he says. “That same conversation I was now having about verticals. So I was very quickly able to connect the dots and go, ‘This is the shift. It’s happening again.’”

Meanwhile, writer-director Scott Brown is gearing up to produce music drama Playback after the success of The Diamond Rose, a romantic thriller for My Drama about a ballet dancer and the man who could save or destroy her. Through his company Second Rodeo Productions, Brown has previously created content with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and MrBeast.

“The fans have been embracing vertical for longer than I’ve been doing this. There’s really a vibrant community of people that reminds me of the early days of YouTube,” he says. “Except this time, audience behaviour dictates that you really can’t not pay attention.”

According to Brown, writing microdramas is “deceptively hard,” as the inciting incident happens in episode one and each episode must end “catastrophically or in some incredibly tense way.” Then after the 20th episode of a 60- or 70-part series, once behind the paywall, the tension can be relaxed slightly. “I just say, grab them by the lapels for the first 20. Hold on. Keep the stakes high,” he says. “Have a lot of fun.”

However, Ovenshire notes that budgets are “very tight.” “That’s a big conversation in the industry right now about these particular pieces. You can’t spend US$2m on every piece, because you [platforms] need to make 10 or 20 of these a month. So we are very tight crews. You’re looking at less than two weeks [filming] for any given show.”

That means it’s important to be creative with the camera, especially with the restrictions of a vertical frame. But whereas traditional horizontal productions would normally use one room as one set, every corner of the same room can be a different set with vertical.

“You get to work with that room in a different way. You get to work with sections of an area. It sets up your story beats just by changing your camera angle and seeing a different side of your space,” Ovenshire says. “Now it feels like a new set, and you can get a lot more out of a single set. But you also don’t have a lot of time to do it, so it’s a lot of collaboration, it’s a lot of trust.”

Welsh company Mojo Productions recently produced Yr Alwad (The Call), Welsh-language broadcaster S4C’s first shortform drama for TikTok. Debuting on S4C’s Hansh channel for 16- to 24-year-olds, the story plays out over the course of seven two-minute phone calls between Dylan and his mum Emma as he is walking through Cardiff town centre on a night out. But when Dylan becomes the target of a gang of homophobic bullies and is eventually attacked, Emma is left helpless at home in the Rhondda Valleys.

The project originally came to Mojo MD and producer Llyr Morus as a short film script from writer-director Alexander Williams. But with funding difficult to come by, he realised the story lent itself to a vertical drama, and won a greenlight from S4C’s young audiences commissioner Guto Rhun to make a microdrama series alongside the 17-minute film version, which is now being taken out to festivals.

“I’d been reading about the growth of vertical dramas so it was on my radar,” Morus says. “When this script landed, it felt as if everything aligned. I’ve never had such a quick commission. From discussing the project to going out was three months.”

The Call was shot in just two days. “You haven’t got two or three years of development and thinking about it, because you’ve got to go with themes and topics that are going to work now and get it out there quick,” Morus says.

With a background in linear scripted television, Mojo received a crash course in making microdramas after sending S4C the first cuts of The Call, complete with “nice wide shots,” general views and cutaways. In fact, Rhun instructed them to cut the first 60 seconds, start on a close-up and begin with someone immediately saying something.

“I was like, ‘That first 60 seconds is beautiful. It looks really, really nice and sets the scene,’” Morus recalls. “Guto said, ‘You haven’t got time to set the scene unless something grabs them. You’ve got less than three seconds to get people engaged.’ So we cut them, obviously, because those were the notes – and when you actually see it on your phone, you go, ‘My God, they’re so true.’ If you were watching a minute of some nice shots and cutaways, you don’t stick with them, so that was really interesting.

“You’ve got to come in hard, grab attention within the first three seconds and keep going at that pace, because people are so eager to scroll to the next thing – you’ve got to really keep them. It’s nice to have a new challenge.”

Meanwhile, other traditional TV players such as Night Train Media and Eccho Rights are entering the microdrama game. The pair have partnered with Spirit Studios to start funded development for the production of a vertical microdrama series that will be launched by Night Train Digital across platforms worldwide.

Described as one of the first of its kind to come out of the UK, the project will be brought to life by a collective of emerging British writing and acting talent. In the project’s writers room, which was led by Spirit Studios, one traditional TV writer worked with a TikTok creator and a British microdrama director to devise a heightened romcom full of hooks and cliffhangers. The identities of those taking part have not yet been revealed.

“Working to that ‘cliffhanger every minute’ structure is so crazy. No idea feels too mad. It’s such an interesting narrative challenge,” says Sarah Postlethwaite, an Eccho Rights acquisitions and development executive, who was in the room. “We were throwing out quite crazy ideas. It was really exciting, buzzy and quick, but from that we have a story [outline] that we think we’re going to go with. The next stage will be fleshing it out into episodes.”

Over the last six months, Postlethwaite and her colleagues have been monitoring the increasing noise around microdramas and decided to invest in this new way people are consuming drama content. “It’s much more useful for us to engage in that and understand it than to sit on the sidelines feeling threatened by it,” she says. “But then also having Night Train Digital as part of the Night Train Media Group [which is also the majority owner of fiction distributor Eccho Rights], we’ve been thinking for a while that we’d love to find a way that the scripted team can work with the digital team. When Spirit came to us with their proposal to launch one of the first UK microdramas, we were like, ‘This feels like such a fun collaboration.’”

Compared with traditional scripted drama, crafting the cliffhangers for each episode might be the biggest challenge. “But it’s interesting, because it’s quite propulsive,” Postlethwaite says. “It’s very linear. You’re not really jumping between timelines. Maybe you’re jumping between worlds, but you just have to be propelling the story forward at the end of every episode. The first 10 episodes tend to be the free ones, so within those first 10 minutes, set up the story, hook people to what’s about to come and then end on a big climax so that you can’t not pay for the episodes.”

Just as Postlethwaite is working with digital creators on developing the project, Brown says it’s imperative that microdramas are crafted with a native online audience in mind. “In the same way that there’s a major and a minor key in music, there are keys in TV. There’s a key of traditional, and then there’s a key of digital, and if you’re not in the right key, the audience might not be able to articulate that, but they’ll tell you by clicking away,” he says. “It’s the difference between jazz music and classical music. An orchestra playing a piece by Beethoven is going to be very practised and very dialled in. No one is playing a note that is not on the page. And then jazz is like this extemporaneous thing that delivers an energy that is marked by a little less preparation.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t prepare extensively for each shoot. He’ll rehearse with his actors, and has learned to focus on close-ups and not worry about coverage. He also leans into the first 20 episodes to hook the audience as quickly as possible. “In this medium, it’s a willingness to explore the unknown,” he says. “There’s a looseness to it. It’s something you learn by watching it. For good or bad, when I’m not about to shoot, I watch two or so hours of YouTube a day, just because I enjoy it. I have so many channels I love. It’s an understanding of what’s more important and the true importance of storytelling.”

With new platforms in tow, Brown’s Second Rodeo is now looking at producing 10 microdramas next year, though he won’t be directing all of them. “I’m really excited to give voices to other filmmakers. I think this can be the incubator a lot of people have thought for digital. We are just excited to continue growing in the space and building this medium with the people in it.”

After The Call, Mojo Productions is now developing a 50-episode TikTok series for S4C. The company is also developing a TikTok comedy, Teleri Hughes’ Ganol Nunlla (Middle of Nowhere), for the same broadcaster. Comprising eight three-minute episodes, it focuses on two young friends who desperately want to get out of their home town of Llanrwst in North Wales and find an exciting new life in Liverpool.

Morus believes microdramas have the potential to be a “brilliant” way of developing and taking risks on new talent – from actors, writers and directors to editors – while also becoming an incubator for potential television series. “It’s development money being spent as it always has, but in a different way. And in a way, it gives better results and greater value for money, because there’s actual content being shared with the audience,” he adds.

“We are very interested in whether there is a [microdrama] world that we create that builds traction and audience, and allows that to eventually become a film or a TV series, but we’re not entering into this project with that as the goal,” Postlethwaite says of her as-yet-untitled series. “We enter into it hoping to make more microdramas with Spirit and Night Train Digital if this is a success, and we see it as a project in itself while also giving us the creative challenge of the new format.”

Ovenshire believes all traditional TV producers should be getting into the microdrama business – and quickly: “Every studio should look at change faster and with more of an open mind to it, and be OK with losing money on trying something new. There’s room to grow, there’s room to expand, and it’s doing it right now. So people want to try to get in the space to be a part of its evolution and where it’s going to go. It’s exciting.”

Zuiker’s own “gameplan” is to make seven different verticals for GammaTime, incorporating key genres like romantic drama, caper, seasonal movie and femme fatale. “Right now, it’s as fast as I can write them,” he says. “Like my prediction for CSI, when I coined the term ‘feature television’ with Jerry Bruckheimer, everybody thought I was crazy [to believe] people would go from movies to TV. And people think I’m crazy [for saying] people will come to vertical shorts. I’m not crazy.

“In the end, you’ve got to skate to where the puck is, and I’m fortunate enough in my career that I can go into new mediums and really dabble in that and see what the future looks like, and also help employ young people and still write and make movies. To me, that’s what it’s all about.

“The world’s changing, and the one thing I pride myself on is not being left behind in the business I love so much, so I unapologetically write my heart out in these vertical shorts. I’m curious to see where it goes.”

tagged in: 10 Entertainment, Anthony E Zuiker, GammaTime, Joshua Ovenshire, Llyr Morus, Mojo Productions, Sarah Postlethwaite, Scott Brown, Second Rodeo, The Call, The Diamond Rose, The Jovenshire, The Temptress, Yr Alwad