Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s redefining what it means to make and watch scripted content in the mobile age.
As promised last week, we’re taking you inside the inaugural ALZA Festival, which brought the vertical storytelling industry to New York City for three days of screenings, premieres, panels, and conversations about the future of the format.
Our guest contributors are Andrew Beck and Thom Woodley of Hudson Vertical, a New York-based studio working in the format. They were involved in the festival’s industry programming, and are well-versed in the sector, making them particularly well-placed to report on what happened both on screen and behind the scenes.
Their dispatch covers everything from the range of stories showcased at the festival to the conversations taking place around audience behavior, branded entertainment, production economics, and the opportunities emerging for filmmakers working in vertical.
We’ll get to their full report after our news round up.
But first...
No intro this week, I’m going to let Andrew and Thom take it from here, right after a quick look at this week’s headlines.
You’re in the best hands.
- Scott
Alright, let’s get into it!
Sony Pictures Television Signs First-Look Deal With Microdrama Creator
Sony Pictures Television has signed digital creator Thea von Engelbrechten to a first-look deal, including the animated microdrama Hazelwood. Another example of a major studio investing in digital-native storytellers, and a reminder that vertical’s potential extends well beyond live-action romance.
Hollywood Horror Veterans Launch a Creator-First Production Label
Image Nation Studios, Spooky Pictures, and Made By Us Studios have launched Made By Spooky, developing horror projects with digital creators across short-form, vertical, and traditional formats.
Astral Tequila’s Five-Episode Microdrama Reaches Six Million YouTube Views
Astral Tequila’s five-episode microdrama, inspired by Practical Magic 2, has reached six million YouTube views, according to the brand. Rather than adapting a traditional advertisement for vertical, the campaign uses serialized storytelling to give audiences a reason to keep watching.
Miami’s Vurt Wants to Give Independent Filmmakers a New Home
Miami-based Vurt is building a vertical entertainment platform for independent filmmakers, offering a 50/50 advertising revenue split. It’s an interesting attempt to create a sustainable distribution model for mobile-first storytelling outside the established studio system.
Reuters: Microdramas Are Poised to Challenge Hollywood’s Biggest Players
Reuters Breakingviews argues that microdramas’ low production costs and rapid audience growth could challenge Hollywood’s established players. It’s a forward-looking argument, but another indication that vertical storytelling is increasingly being taken seriously as a competitive entertainment business.
The Scroll Comes to 19th Street: Notes From the First ALZA Festival
By Andrew Beck and Thom Woodley
Disclosure: We run Hudson Vertical, a New York studio working in the format. We programmed “Made in New York: Building a Vertical Production Economy,” which Thom joined as a panelist. Thom also moderated “Beyond the Ad: Building Branded Vertical Series.”
ALZA Festival held its inaugural edition October 16th, 17th & 18th at AMC 19th Street in New York. Founded by Pete Torres, former COO of Tribeca Enterprises, the festival had the city’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment as its founding industry partner and Torres billed it as the first premium U.S. festival dedicated to microdrama and vertical storytelling.
The weekend paired screenings of vertical series - including 35 world premieres - with industry panels and creator conversations, giving audiences a chance to see the work and hear from the people behind it.
On The Screen
Billionaire romances shared the screen with vampire conspiracies, literary reinventions, political thrillers and distinctly New York comedy at ALZA. Across the slate, filmmakers were exploring how much territory vertical storytelling could cover and how familiar genres could take on a different rhythm in the format.
Established intellectual property offered one route in. Former Prodigy Media’s Moriarty Rising: A Sherlock Holmes Tale, directed by Alessio Liguori, relocated the beginnings of the Holmes–Moriarty rivalry to contemporary Turin, pairing a university setting with a diamond-heist mystery. LoveHit’s Pride and Prejudice, directed by Jerry Bradford, brought Austen’s marriage economics into a contemporary story involving unaffordable medical care. Alex Boi’s Billionaire’s Broken Vow, a romance-and-revenge story featuring Eric Roberts, joined these projects in opening a business conversation: producer Phil Viardo’s slate includes productions developed for release as both vertical series and independent features.
Genre filmmakers brought their own pedigrees and audience instincts. VertTV’s Bite Club, directed by Sam Irvin and written by Michael Varrati, combined campus romance, a murder investigation and a secret vampire society. Its casting supplied a knowing connection for horror fans: Barbara Crampton and Russell Todd reunited in the year of Chopping Mall’s 40th anniversary. Devon Jovi Johnson’s Married the Wrong Guy, with Richard Lawson among its producers, drew inspiration from ’90s action thrillers, placing a woman between her fugitive lover and the federal-agent husband pursuing him.
Reunion Island, from Microhouse Films and Lifetime, found another recognizable audience entry point in reality dating television. Directed by Gary and Edmund Entin, it turned a reunion of former contestants at a Maui mansion into a psychological trap. The creators explicitly cited the combination of Love Island’s interpersonal drama and Glass Onion’s murder-mystery appeal, illustrating how vertical producers are combining established audience appetites.
The independent work expanded the picture further where Kyle C. Mumford’s Kyle Has Tourette’s, part of the Created in NY Showcase, drew on real life for a heartfelt comedy about isolation and connection in the city. Best Vertical Series winner RelationShiTs brought estranged sisters, a possible murder and a psychedelic healing ceremony into one West Village brownstone. Innovation honoree Newborn, directed by Jan Latto and Hannah Rose Doherty, ventured into period crime drama, following young outsiders caring for a baby amid gang violence in the Bronx in 1979.
And the awards reflected that range: Gregory Alan Williams earned Best Performance for NOTED: Table For Two, while Salvador Paskowitz took Best Director for Layover. Sydni Beaudoin’s Voicemails From My Neighbor won Best Vertical Short, and the Entins’ election-conspiracy thriller The Count received the One More Episode Award. Romel Rodriguez’s The Super NYC earned the Made in NY Award, selected by the public. It was the first time the city’s honor recognized a vertical storyteller. Together, the selections suggested a format making room for both commercial hooks and individual creative voices.
Inside The Industry Program
The industry programming track consisted of 14 sessions covering everything from turning brands into studios to adapting stories for multiple screens to building an audience for African microdramas.
Evergreen questions kept surfacing in the panels we took in. What makes someone stop scrolling? What brings them back? And how does a series support itself once they do?
1. Getting Someone To Stop Is Only The Beginning
“I want to know where your finger is in the first three seconds,” Todd Spicer said at “Who Survives the Vertical Boom: Building the Business of Vertical Drama,” moderated by Amanda Needham. A filmmaker can expect someone who bought a movie ticket to give the story a little time while on a phone, the next thing to watch is always within reach. And Jay Blumenfield said learning to write for that audience required unlearning some habits from 20 years in television. His description of a microdrama was blunt: “a string of marketing moments stuck together that tell a loosely logical story.” Each turn has to give someone a reason to keep watching. Accept that requirement, he argued, and there is still room to bring your own ideas to the work.
Jeffrey Schenck traced the effect on structure, comparing a feature’s three acts with vertical stories built around dozens of breaks. But the producers were still testing assumptions about the format. Schenck recalled shortening episodes from 90 seconds to 50, “No one said anything.” While the pacing mattered, the prescribed running time was open to revision.
Spicer’s audience research had challenged another assumption. He had initially expected viewers to watch between shifts or while on the move. Instead, he described people watching in bed on Sunday nights for three hours, much as they would watch a favorite HBO show, indicating that a fickle audience that decides quickly on if a show is worth watching, can still settle in for an evening screening.
2. A Brand Can Build A Show People Come Back For
Bilt - the fintech loyalty rewards platform that lets renters and homeowners earn points on large monthly home payments - offered a detailed case-study of developing an audience from scratch for their series, Roomies. Cyrus Ferguson – the in-house content director at Bilt – described how an early batch of short, sketch-style episodes failed to catch on, leading the team to take them down and rebuild the series as a mockumentary, starting with one character’s arrival in New York.
In the pilot shown, protagonist Ellie arrives from Ohio with little money, no job and no apartment. Rent is an immediate problem for her to solve, giving the Bilt platform a natural place in her world. Bilt’s partner businesses also appear, including the café where another character works.
Roomies has more than 46 episodes out, averaging about 700,000 views apiece, without paid promotion. Overall, the stated goal is views and cultural reach rather than immediate conversion, allowing the show to build its own following.
3. The Series Can Live Where The Audience Already Watches
For several of the branded projects discussed, social platforms, not standalone apps, were the destination for a series. At “Beyond the Ad: Building Branded Vertical Series,” SuperLab’s Grace Swanson described distributing through brands’ social channels, reaching viewers where they already follow the company or its creators. The process she described involved developing 12-episode series with brands and choosing creators whose audiences fit each project. SuperLab also makes episodes shoppable: products are tagged within the videos, allowing a viewer watching a Crocs episode to buy the shoes on screen, while also supporting a non-paywalled show. And filmmaker Owen Gambill who produces The Weekly Bird for birddogs brand explained how the show draws its characters and setups from the very employees in the birdogs office.
4. Make Work That Could Only Come From New York
The question at “Made in New York: Building a Vertical Production Economy” was how to turn the city into a viable production hub for vertical storytelling. Woodley argued that New York couldn’t compete with LA or Atlanta on price. “We can’t win that and we shouldn’t try,” he said, proposing instead to make work that feels “indelibly New York.”
Panelists Qianfan Chen and Mitch Camarda also pointed to the city’s appeal on screen, the variety and density of locations, and the substantial pool of local talent and crew. In sum, write with New York in mind from the start. Build around its neighborhoods, available locations and local performers. Brooklyn Coffee Shop and Jonah Feingold’s romance-centric productions were cited as examples of series built around life in the city.
Panelists also discussed how New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) could better support the scale and pace of vertical production. Access to incentives remains another consideration: smaller productions can fall below the standard state film tax credit’s $1 million budget threshold for qualified films shooting primarily in the city.
5. Local Stories Can Find Audiences Elsewhere
At “Small Screens, Big Reach: Africa Goes Vertical,” CEEIT co-founder Lavenna Peters described finding little representation of Black stories when she began exploring microdrama apps. She saw an opportunity to build a platform around African creators and a massive young audience already watching entertainment on phones - (1.5B people with 60% of the population under the age of 25 according to UN Economic Commission for Africa).
Peters said the Asian microdramas she watched reminded her of Nollywood films she had grown up with and so CEEIT began acquiring the scripts to these successful shows to remake with African casts, alongside developing original work.
Producer Melissa Adeyemo argued that those stories should be made for Africans first. “I think things only travel if they speak locally,” she said. Drawing on Nollywood’s reach beyond Nigeria, she emphasized working with storytellers who know the lives they are depicting and recounted an experience when just because a producer has a connection to the diaspora doesn’t automatically mean that their version of life in Nigeria will ring true to Nigerians.
Peters made a similar point about language. Listeners around the world enjoy Burna Boy without understanding every Yoruba lyric and so why then assume a series needs to lose its local language to find viewers elsewhere? The session included a screening of the South African series Confessions of a Gold Digger.
Wrap Up
ALZA Festival’s first edition gave these conversations a useful home where producers could share their work, explain how it came together and compare notes. There was plenty of enthusiasm for where vertical storytelling could go, backed by examples of people already trying to get it there. That gives a second edition something to build on. Looking forward to year two.
Explore the full film program and industry sessions.
That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.
We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.
We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.
See you then.
Editor: Scott Brown
Writer: Franziska Harms