In a sterile hospital room, hired muscle in dark suits yank a man out of his bed and throw him to the ground.
The goons are there on orders of the hospitalized man’s son-in-law, who comes from a powerful old money family. The patient is a hapless victim. His daughter is carrying another man’s child, the result of a screw up by an in vitro fertilization clinic, and she’s fallen in love with that other man.
The armed men are punishing the patient for his daughter’s actions, and both of them, in the room, now cower in fear.
“Cut!”
They’re not in a real hospital room, however. It’s a set inside of a sweltering South Fulton office park that lacked air conditioning. As the director called cut, the man playing the patient was helped to his feet by the actors playing brutes on the set of “Billionaire Defense Contractor.”
You won’t find “Billionaire Defense Contractor” on CBS or ABC daytime, but the short-form soap opera is part of a new wave of production in Georgia. As film and television production remains sluggish across the U.S., many industry workers in Atlanta are taking more alternative work to pay the bills.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution visited the set in recent weeks. Production company Crazy Stone Studio is in the midst of shooting one episode out of about 50-60 planned for the series.
“It’s a modern day fairy tale,” Crazy Stone’s co-founder Peter Gomer jokes.
“Billionaire Defense Contractor” is what is known as a “micro-drama” or “vertical short.” They’re soap operas for the digital age, comprised of several one- or two-minute episodes filmed in a 9:16 aspect ratio — meaning they’re designed to be watched vertically on a phone.
The first few episodes are typically teased on social media websites, and then the rest of the series is uploaded onto platforms that charge either by the episode or for a monthly subscription. There are many vertical soap streamers to choose from, including ReelShort, DramaBox and Vigloo.
Now an emerging form of media, micro-dramas are playing a role in Georgia’s entertainment ecosystem. Produced by companies lured by Georgia’s skilled crew base, micro-dramas are filling in the gaps between longer-term narrative or commercial projects, even if they’re not as well-paying as a Marvel flick or season of “Stranger Things.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Micro-dramas mostly employ non-union crew members and actors. They have micro-sized budgets and do not meet the threshold to qualify for Georgia’s film tax credit, which requires a minimum spend of $500,000.
The projects, at least for now, aren’t necessarily journeys into the human condition bound for Oscar glory. Their storylines play off of tropes well-established in the romance and drama genres and are given titles such as: “Tempted by Mafia Boss,” “Oops! I Married My Forgetful Ex-Boyfriend” and “Signed, Sealed, Deceived by My Billionaire Mailboy.” They’re salacious enough to grab the attention of a viewer, though not too salacious to alienate them.
Viewers are mostly women, which could explain much of the platforms’ propensity toward soapy plotlines, said Jacob Tanur, founder of New York-based Click Play Films, which films micro-dramas in Atlanta. App users spend tokens on the shows they want, Tanur said.
“Every token they spend to watch these movies on these vertical [platforms], they’re voting for what they want to keep seeing. That’s the stuff that they really want to see,” Tanur said. “And it’s been working. They’re leaning hard into the cliché. Popcorn friendly, carefree shots that you just want to be swept up in and leave reality for a bit.”
There is an audience for them. Downloads of popular short drama apps more than tripled in the year that ended in February, according to data from analytics firm Appfigures.
Companies are coming out of the woodwork to cash in on the trend. Two years ago, there were five platforms, said Brett Newton, an executive producer for Crazy Maple Studio, which owns ReelShort. Now, there are more than 100.
In the spirit of B-movies, the projects are filmed at a breakneck speed. A typical shoot for a series with as many episodes as “Billionaire Defense Contractor” will last about seven to 10 days, with the crew shooting about 15 to 20 episodes per day.
“They want to be quick,” Crazy Stone co-founder Cecilia Gomer said. “Every minute, every day, the market is changing. The audience has a different taste. They want to adjust their strategy as soon as possible. If we made a decision in June to see it in September, if it’s released in November, it’s already backward.”
The format first took off in China. Within the last few years, as vertical video content has popularized with the rise of social media, foreign-owned-and-operated micro-drama platforms have begun to engage producers in the U.S. to adapt some of their more popular titles into English with localization.
Crazy Stone is one of them. A representative for Dramawave, the platform on which the project will be uploaded, traveled to Atlanta from Beijing to ensure the project aligned with its standards.
Crazy Stone made Atlanta one of its primary filming bases because of ample crew and the city’s picturesque scenery, Gomer said. The producers tend to cast lead actors outside Atlanta but cast supporting members locally.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
New media, new problems
The format is not without its faults.
The tight filming schedule can be an abrupt adjustment to experienced TV and film actors or crew members and so can the lower pay. And some of the outside producers hired by the platforms to film verticals don’t come from production backgrounds. This has created frustrations for other experienced producers or crew members on some projects, said Stephen Beehler, a producer in Atlanta who began working on verticals last summer.
“In some cases, you have people in charge who have never made a movie before,” Beehler said. “They don’t understand standard protocols and procedures of the profession, or even the basic terminology.”
Because the format is so new, some production companies are not following the best practices, said Newton. On the sets he oversees for ReelShort, he said he works hard to closely follow union rules, even though they’re non-union projects. This includes offering competitive wages, according to Newton.
Plus, some of the production companies are also from out of state, which means a chunk of the budget allocated toward the production is not staying within Georgia. Both Crazy Stone and Click Play Films do not have physical footprints in the state. Crazy Stone is in the process of adding an office and studio space in the city, Peter Gomer said.
Given the format’s soapy nature, it’s not uncommon for crew members on micro-dramas to be embarrassed by their work. Some use pseudonyms or stipulate in their contracts that the credit will not be added to their IMDb pages. A number of crew members declined to be interviewed for this story.
But Beehler has noticed the stigma has lessened overtime.
“You’re making a movie,” Beehler said. “Fundamentally, it’s all the same. Are there specific script, archetypes and tropes that we are hitting over and over again? Yes, but so is every soap opera. Things are cliché for a reason, because they work.”
Beehler doesn’t mind verticals. He likes the fact that they’re filmed quickly — production is wrapped before anyone can get the itch to move onto something new. Movies can take so long to make sometimes, he said, and these projects provide a short-term gratification of seeing the fruits of their labor within a month or two.
“I almost feel like there’s a Pokemon card collecting mentality, where it’s like: ‘Oh, I’ve done one for this platform and this one,’ or ‘Have you done the military genre or a werewolf one?’ It’s like this gamified, fun little thing,” Beehler said.
The future for micro-dramas is uncertain. Like all forms of emerging media, it’ll take a couple of years for companies trying to take advantage of the craze to see if there is a return on investment.
Newton is confident vertical dramas will not go away. They’ll only evolve into more genres and more sophisticated manners of storytelling.
“This is the beginning of the way people are going to ingest content,” Newton said. “Vertical is not going away until everybody has a chip in their head, everyone is ingesting content from that chip and cellphones are inferior.”
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