VERTICAL DRAMA TECHNIQUE
MOVE FAST AND MAKE THINGS Crew Studio (bottom left) works rapidly, while Sea Star (right) speaks to the format’s opportunities
traction. Duanju, with roots in the country’s highly active fan-fiction scene, began to take off with a distinctive brand of ultra short-form (typically one- to two-minute), campy mini dramas. The format as we know it today was born and people loved it. In 2026, the Duanju market is estimated to be worth $9bn, outpacing the national Box Office revenue for the first time in 2024. One of the major players in the market is the aforementioned ReelShort – owned by Crazy Maple Studio – which describes itself as a ‘tech entertainment company’ and has a similar model to Netflix, in that it both produces its own content and licenses content from other creators for its platform. The ReelShort app utilises a virtual currency system in which users purchase ‘coins’ to unlock episodes of their shows. The output of ReelShort/Crazy Maple Studio would blow the mind of anyone used to working on traditional film and TV production: in 2025, the company churned out 400 series, and the target for 2026 is 600. This rapid turnover means the company is extremely agile, mimicking the micro-trends and ever- changing mores of its social media- obsessed audience. Another benefit of this speed is that it has been able to create an efficient feedback loop, testing content on the market and responding to what does and doesn’t resonate, ultimately giving people more of what they are engaging with. Its 65 million active monthly users suggest that the approach is working. In China, the format is booming, but it’s taking off around the rest of the world too. ReelShort reports that around 50% of its users are based in the US, with 10% – and growing – in Europe. There’s a preconception that this is very much a Gen Z phenomenon, but a ReelShort team member tells me it actually skews slightly older than you might think, with the core demographic sitting between 25 and 35. A key player in the UK scene is Crew Studio. Founder Nathan Caselton embraced the trend around six months
ago when he saw the potential for it to go mainstream here. “You’ve got to look at Channel 4, ITV and BBC, who are all quite explicitly saying that they are commissioning social-first content,” he says. “They’ve not yet fully jumped in, but I reckon in about five years’ time – with Channel 4 probably being one of the first – they will be making their own vertical drama content.” Caselton says that, right now, vertical dramas being produced in the UK can be somewhat ‘chaotic’, with platforms often hiring companies from a corporate video background to produce content, with varying levels of success. “Film and television production and corporate production are two entirely different beasts – casting, location, narrative structure, getting the best performances out of actors – it’s an entirely different world,” he stresses.
Caselton thinks that teams who have come from a continuous drama background – the likes of Casualty , Holby City , etc – are particularly well placed to thrive in vertical drama, since they are used to getting through a high volume of pages each day, making content quickly and making sure it’s up to a broadcast standard. “We’ve tapped into those teams and sought to link them up to these projects because they have the experience to do it at pace,” he shares. INSIDE A VERTICAL DRAMA PRODUCTION That pace is the starkest difference between a vertical drama shoot and a traditional production. At Sea Star Productions, Thomson tells me they might typically get two to three weeks for pre-production and shoot for six days, covering about 15 pages of script
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