Format guide
What is vertical drama?
A vertical drama is a serialized story told in short vertical episodes made for a phone held upright. Episodes run about one to two minutes, nearly every one ends on a cliffhanger, and a season can run 50 to 100 of them. It is also called short drama or micro-drama, and it is the format apps like ReelShort and DramaBox are built around.
The format
One story, cut small enough to watch anywhere.
Two constraints define the format, and everything else about it follows from them.
The format goes by several names. Short drama and micro-drama mean the same thing, and the Chinese term duanju describes the original wave it grew out of. What all of them describe is one shape: a full season of story, cut into pieces short enough to finish while waiting in a queue.
The first constraint is the episode. At roughly one to two minutes there is no room for a slow open, a subplot, or a scene that exists only to set mood. Every episode has to land one turn and leave a question open. Miss that and the viewer swipes, because the next thing to watch is one gesture away.
The second constraint is length. A season of 50 to 100 episodes adds up to about the runtime of a feature film, which changes what production has to solve. One striking clip is not the unit of work. The unit is a season that has to stay coherent for hours, across every face, room, and outfit in it.
Season structure
How a season is built.
Vertical drama seasons follow a shape you can read from the outside once you know what to look for. For premises already built around it, see the short drama idea library.
The opening episodes are free and exist to hook. Escalation stacks reversals fast, because the format rewards incident over atmosphere. Somewhere in the first act the platform asks the viewer to pay to keep going, which is why the episode just before that point carries the heaviest cliffhanger in the season. Everything after it is paid, so it has to keep earning the tap all the way to a finale that pays off the premise from episode one.
Production
How a vertical drama gets made.
The pipeline is the same whether the season is filmed or generated. Only the middle step changes, and for a generated season it runs on prompts like the ones in the Seedance 2.0 prompt library.
Premise and logline
The pitch has to work in one sentence, because that sentence is also the ad. Most seasons start from a trope with a reversal already built into it.
Season plan
Beats are mapped across the whole run before anything is shot or generated: where the hooks land, where the paywall sits, what the finale pays off.
Scripts by episode
Scenes are written to the episode, not to the act. Each one carries a single turn and ends on a question the next episode answers.
Casting and continuity
Filmed or generated, the same faces, rooms, outfits, and props have to show up in episode sixty that showed up in episode one.
Shooting or generating
Traditional vertical drama shoots fast: a whole season in seven to ten days, at fifteen to twenty script pages a day against the three to five a feature manages. AI production replaces the shoot with generation, which trades a scheduling problem for a continuity problem.
Assembly and release
Episodes are cut, captioned, and delivered as vertical 9:16 video, then metered out to viewers rather than dropped all at once.
Comparisons
What vertical drama is not.
The format gets mistaken for three neighbors it does not behave like, and each mistake costs a production something different.
Not a short film
A short film is one self-contained story with its own ending. A vertical drama is one long story delivered in fragments, and no single episode is meant to satisfy on its own.
Not a television episode
A television episode runs twenty to sixty minutes and can afford a B plot and a quiet scene. A vertical drama episode is closer to a single scene with a turn at the end of it.
Not a single AI clip
A generated clip is seconds long and answers to one prompt. A season is hundreds of clips that have to agree with each other about who the characters are and what the rooms look like.
Glossary
Vertical drama terms.
The words that come up in every short drama production conversation.
Hook
The opening seconds that decide whether a viewer keeps watching. In vertical drama the hook is usually a reversal rather than a setup, because there is no time to earn one.
Cliffhanger
The unresolved question an episode ends on. In this format nearly every episode carries one, which is what makes a season of fifty run like a single sitting.
Paywall beat
The episode where free viewing stops and the viewer is asked to pay to continue. It carries the strongest cliffhanger in the season by design.
Continuity
Keeping faces, locations, wardrobe, and props identical from episode to episode. It is the hardest problem in AI-generated series work and the reason a good clip is not yet a show.
Logline
One sentence stating who wants what and what stands in the way. In vertical drama it doubles as the marketing copy, so it is written to sell as well as to orient.
Duanju
The Chinese term for the short-form serialized drama this format grew out of. It translates roughly as short play, and the vertical apps exported the shape to other markets.
Making one
The format's hard problem is continuity, not clips.
Anything that can generate a minute of convincing drama has solved the easy half. A season is hundreds of clips that have to share the same faces, rooms, outfits, and light, held together by a plan that knows where every hook and paywall beat lands. Teleplay is a production workspace for serialized vertical drama: it holds your character, location, and prop references and reuses them across every scene and episode, so episode fifty still looks like episode one.
Join the betaFAQ
Vertical drama questions.
What people ask once they know what the format is.
What is short drama?
Short drama is another name for vertical drama, and micro drama is a third. All three describe the same thing: a serialized story told in vertical 9:16 episodes of about one to two minutes, each one ending on a cliffhanger, with a season running 50 to 100 of them. Which name you hear depends mostly on which app or market someone came through, not on any difference in the format itself.
How long is a short drama episode?
Most short drama episodes run about one to two minutes, which is why a season can hold dozens of them. That length is what forces the format's discipline: one hook, one turn, and a reason to tap the next episode. It also changes how a season gets written, since the beats are shaped episode by episode rather than by writing one long script and cutting it apart afterward.
How many episodes are in a vertical drama season?
A vertical drama season often runs 50 to 100 episodes. Because each episode is only about one to two minutes, the whole season adds up to roughly the runtime of a feature film. The episode count is a delivery choice rather than a story-length choice: the same story cut into more pieces gives the viewer more decision points to keep going.
Why does every episode end on a cliffhanger?
Because the next tap is never guaranteed. A vertical drama is watched on a phone alongside every other app on that phone, so an episode that resolves cleanly gives the viewer a natural place to stop. Ending on an open question moves the decision from whether to keep watching to how the question resolves.
How do vertical dramas make money?
The first stretch of episodes is free, and at a set point the viewer pays to continue. On the major apps that means buying coins to unlock episodes one at a time, earning coins by watching rewarded ads, or taking a weekly or monthly subscription for unlimited access. That structure is why the paywall beat is planned into the season from the start: the episode immediately before it has to carry the strongest cliffhanger in the run, because it is the one being asked to convert.
Can you make a vertical drama with AI?
Yes, and the hard part is not the individual clip. Current video models can produce a convincing minute of drama. What a season needs is the same character, wardrobe, and location appearing across hundreds of generations, plus a plan that holds the arc together. That is a production problem rather than a generation problem, which is what a workspace like Teleplay is built to solve.
How long does it take to make a vertical drama season?
Traditionally a season is shot in seven to ten days, with scripting and post around it, which is what makes the format economically viable at its price point. AI production removes the shoot itself, so the schedule shifts toward planning, asset consistency, and review of generated clips.
Private beta
Make a vertical drama season of your own.
Join the waitlist for a production workspace built for serialized vertical drama.
Private beta for creators building short drama series.