Your series.
Episode by episode.

A micro drama is a serialised vertical drama told in very short episodes — typically 60 to 120 seconds each, with 40 to 100 episodes in a season. Every episode ends on a cliffhanger, and the format is built for phone viewing: 9:16, close framings, fast cuts, and dialogue that carries the story. It's the format behind apps like ReelShort and DramaBox.

60 to 120 seconds, with 90 seconds the most common target. The structure inside that is tight: a hook in the first three seconds, one escalation, one turn, and a cliffhanger on the final beat. Episodes that run longer tend to lose the drop-off curve that makes the format work.

Build the series bible first — cast, locations, and the episode ladder — then generate each episode as a sequence of short shots that all share the same character and location references. Add voices, captions, and score, and assemble. The critical part is consistency: the same faces and the same sets have to survive across every episode, which is a references problem rather than a prompting one.

Store each character once, with locked identity stills, wardrobe variants, and a fixed voice, and reference that record from every shot in every episode. What breaks long-running series is re-describing a character in a later episode, which re-invents them. If a tool can't carry reference images between episodes, it can't hold a season together.

In practice, yes. The format exists because of phone viewing, and its grammar — close sizes, fast cuts, faces over environments, captions for muted playback — is built for a 9:16 frame. Landscape footage cropped to vertical loses the composition the shot was staged for, so vertical needs to be a generation decision rather than an export one.

Traditionally $150,000 to $300,000 per season for a live-action shoot. Generated with AI, the cost is measured in render credits and driven mostly by how many times you regenerate each shot — which is why approving the script, the character stills, and the pacing before rendering video matters more than any per-clip price.

The standard model is to seed the first few episodes free on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts to drive discovery, then monetise later episodes behind a coin or subscription paywall in an app. That's why daily drops and a hard cliffhanger on every episode matter commercially, not just creatively.