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Overheard at the gym: two strangers arguing, with real heat, about whether the secret heir should have forgiven his mother before the finale. We wanted to jump in. We did not. We are, however, still thinking about it.
Vertical drama gets its own convention and awards night
For a format Hollywood spent years waving off, vertical drama is throwing itself a party, and handing out hardware. VertiCon returns for a second year on August 21 to 23 at the Hilton Culver City in California, with actor panels, autograph sessions, photo ops and meet-and-greets built around the performers who anchor these shows. The centerpiece is The Verties, a live in-person awards ceremony honoring vertical films and the people who make them. Industry professionals nominate projects and performers across categories, from the heroic lead to the standout villain, and then fans vote to crown the winners. There is even a fan-nominated Best App prize. A villain category. Finally, someone gets it.
It is a small thing that signals a big one. Conventions and trophy shows are what a medium builds once it stops apologizing for existing, and vertical, all of six years old, is clearly done apologizing. The first edition pulled in the actors, directors and crews quietly building the format; the second comes back bigger, on a full convention footing.
Why this matters for you: If you act in, direct, shoot or cut vertical series, the format just built a room where you can be seen, celebrated and, frankly, hired. A fan-voted trophy is a real credit now, a panel seat is a platform, and a convention floor in Culver City is exactly where a lot of next year's call sheets quietly get filled.
Sources: VertiCon · The Verties · True Hollywood Talk
🇺🇸 United States
1. YouTube handed Shorts creators the thumbnail. In its July 24 update, YouTube began letting YouTube Partner Program (YPP) creators upload fully custom thumbnails for Shorts, changing how a vertical episode shows up in search, on a channel page and other browse surfaces off the main feed; the same rollout gave Shorts a more prominent home on the TV app and stopped early profanity from automatically blocking monetization. Small screen, meet big screen. → SocialBee
2. An indie sci-fi vertical is skipping the romance formula. Filmmaker Barton Bund's Time Away is a science-fiction microdrama built on practical effects, hand-built models, liquid chemical reactions, green-screen weightlessness shot on a trampoline, techniques straight out of the Stanley Kubrick and Douglas Trumbull playbook, with new chapters rolling out on its Instagram. Black holes filmed in a kitchen. We love it here. → Real Reel
3. Bold & Beautiful boss Bradley Bell shoots his first microdrama. The longtime soap showrunner's Red Flair Entertainment is producing Hollywood Starlet, a vertical series starring Eric Guilmette, Molly Anderson and Bella Mraz, another daytime veteran carrying decades of serialized craft onto the phone. → Michael Fairman TV
Here's what else is new:
A working-actor guide maps the vertical talent boom. StarNow's rundown walks performers through how careers get built in the format, where the paying work sits and what casting directors now look for in a first-second hook. → StarNow
A jobs-outlook guide breaks down what vertical actually pays. Backstage lays out the market for actors, the day rates, the pace of hiring and where the format sits as a real source of paid work rather than a novelty gig. → Backstage
🌐 Worldwide
1. Story TV is going all in on South India. The Eloelo Group platform announced its biggest regional bet yet: more than 1,000 original microdramas by March 2027 in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, built with regional writers, directors and actors as original intellectual property (IP), not dubbed imports. A thousand originals is a cannonball, not a toe in the water. → MediaNews4u · BestMediaInfo
2. Belgium's Dedsit lands a 20-title vertical order. Telenet-owned broadcaster Play Media has commissioned prodco Dedsit to make 20 microdramas for its new Play Shorts hub, one of the largest single vertical slates in production anywhere in Europe, and the first Flemish-language microdramas. Twenty orders is twenty call sheets. → C21Media
3. Germany's first AI microdrama studio has a name. Deep Sauce Labs is prepping Badaboom, a mobile-first German app spanning romance, thriller, crime, mystery, period and family drama, and is working with Leipzig's Red Pony Pictures on hybrid live-action-plus-artificial-intelligence (AI) series promising "authentic German stories" of one to five minutes; a launch date has not been set. Hybrid, note, not all-machine. The actors stay. → C21Media
Here's what else is new:
Spain's traditional players stop dismissing vertical. Trade analysis reads the Spanish audiovisual sector as finally moving: microdrama has stopped being treated as an imported curiosity, and incumbents are beginning to build for themselves. → Audiovisual451
Showmax's exit is nudging African filmmakers toward vertical. With the prestige streamer discontinued on April 30 and its originals folded into DStv Stream, screen crews across the continent are eyeing mobile microdramas as the next place to work. → Variety
Today's Pick
British actor Mike Kelson has a 35-year stage-and-screen career and a growing stack of UK-shot vertical dramas; in this Vertical Drama Love sit-down with Jen Cooper he gets into Bollywood pace, British accents and what these fast-turnaround shoots actually feel like from inside the frame. → Watch on YouTube
A thousand orders in four southern languages, a Belgian order of twenty, a German app taking shape: the count of people who want your story told in their own tongue went up again today.
Until tomorrow. Stay Vertical.
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