The micro-drama kit: everything a vertical series needs

What counts as a micro-drama?

A micro-drama is a serial told in vertical episodes of a minute or two, where each episode ends on a question that sells the next one. The format is built for phones: one or two people in frame, short lines, a turn every few seconds. Series in the studio run 10 to 80 episodes of 60, 90 or 120 seconds at 9:16, which fits YouTube's definition of a Short: square or vertical, up to three minutes.

What's in the kit

The hook and the cliffhanger do most of the work

Every outline in the kit has a 3-second hook, rising beats, a reveal and a cliffhanger. The writers' room drafts them, and they're worth rewriting by hand, because nothing else in the kit decides whether someone watches episode two.

• Start at the moment things go wrong. Skip the establishing shot and the introductions. “She opens the envelope and sees her own name” works as a first shot. “She walks to the mailbox” doesn't.
• End on a question someone could say out loud. “Who sent the photo?” pulls people on. A vague feeling of dread doesn't.
• Keep one turn to an episode. A minute holds one reveal. A second one wastes a cliffhanger you could have had next time.
• Write the “Previously on” line for a stranger. Someone will land on episode seven first. One sentence should tell them who wants what.

Why the cast sheet comes early

Keeping a face the same from shot to shot is the hardest part of AI video. The kit's answer is to lock each character once, as a portrait plus extra views, and send those pictures with every shot to a model that keeps identity from pictures. Describe the face, hair, build and usual clothes precisely. Say the time of day and the light for every place, because the same place at another time counts as a separate place. No model guarantees an identical face from shot to shot, so watch a Draft episode before you pay for a full season.

Subtitles and dubs

Subtitles are the cheap way into a new language. A voice dub keeps the picture and replaces the dialogue with new voices, for episodes up to 150 seconds, though the lips won't match. For lips that do, send the episode through the AI Video Translator at its own price. Translate before you dub, and shorten long translated lines: a dub speeds a line up a little to fit its shot, then trims it. Keep the original lines to about 18 words: short lines fit their shots, and a translation has room to run longer.

The upload pack

The last tab turns episodes into posts. Publish writes the copy for your platform, makes a cover for each episode, and finishes each one with burned-in subtitles and its cards. The season then downloads as one ZIP, with a metadata sheet that lists every episode's titles, hashtags per platform, length and files, so whoever uploads doesn't have to hunt for anything.