\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been told by multiple people that the set of a short drama doesn\u2019t necessarily look that different from an indie movie or commercial shoot, except everything is churned out much faster to save on costs. Whereas a traditional shoot would last weeks or months, the entire season of a vertical show is typically filmed within two weeks.<\/p>\n
Nicole Mattox, one of the vertical stars working with ReelShort in Los Angeles, told me she usually books two to three shoots in one month, with only two days in between. A professionally trained actress originally from Texas, she had only been in a few small movie productions before stumbling on the short drama industry in 2023. But she says she quickly learned how to remember all of her lines\u2014an impressive feat, considering that the platforms usually shoot a dozen pages of script a day, whereas a traditional movie may only shoot three.<\/p>\n
Mattox says her acting coach told her that her performances don\u2019t have to be unrealistically dramatic; rather, it\u2019s just that every plot development is incredibly meaningful for her characters. For example, in the fictional world of a vertical drama, a romantic breakup can be your entire life. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing else for you to move on from. There\u2019s no future for you anymore. Everything\u2019s ruined,\u201d Mattox explains.<\/p>\n
Hao, who works in talent recruiting for ReelShort, says many of the company\u2019s actors come from modeling or advertising backgrounds and have never had speaking roles before. Now, they can star in a dozen shows in a single year and quickly grow their careers.<\/p>\n
The third ReelShort production Mattox starred in was a romantic comedy about professional ice hockey called Breaking the Ice.<\/em> Mattox played the personal assistant to an NHL player, who naturally, was also his secret baby mama. The show became a runaway success, with over 300 million views on ReelShort.<\/p>\n Mattox says she has been surprised by how devoted her fans are, a large number of whom are in the Philippines. In May, some of them paid to put a picture of her face on a billboard in Times Square to celebrate her birthday. Earlier this month, they rented another billboard in Manila to advertise her latest production. Your show \u201chad me in a chokehold,\u201d one commenter wrote on her personal TikTok account, where she has amassed over 130,000 followers.<\/p>\n What ReelShort did after Breaking the Ice<\/em> became a hit demonstrates the real secret behind its success. The company quickly adapted it for the Spanish-speaking and Japanese-speaking markets, but rather than dubbing the existing dialog or simply swapping the actors, it changed key aspects of the plot. In the Spanish version, the male protagonist became a soccer player, while in the Japanese version, he was a baseball star. The original series debuted in July 2024; the locally filmed adaptations dropped in September and December the same year.<\/p>\n In Hollywood, that kind of speed is unfathomable. Four years after the Korean Netflix show Squid Game<\/em> became a global sensation, the American adaptation is still only rumored to be in the works. The short drama industry can move much faster not only because its production costs are low, but because startups like ReelShort have mastered the art of localization\u2014after all, they first had to export the genre from China. While Sensor Tower says US audiences still represent about 49 percent of the global revenues, half of downloads of short drama apps this year have come from Latin America and Southeast Asia. That explains why ReelShort produced its hit English show The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband<\/em> in five other languages, and why it has started working with legacy telenovela production companies in Colombia.<\/p>\n ReelShort\u2019s parent company, Crazy Maple Studio, was previously majority-controlled by COL Group, one of the largest digital novel publishers in China. The startup now says its founder, Joey Jia, owns the company, though COL Group continues to hold 49 percent of shares. Even as the genre goes global, most of the people making short dramas in the US still appear to be Chinese immigrants or Chinese Americans, largely because they are more familiar with how it works.<\/p>\n Jay, a Los Angeles\u2013based short-drama producer from China, says the industry still looks to China for guidance and inspiration. One of the key lessons it learned from China is the importance of collecting extremely granular user data. Which episode made people stop watching a show? Which one made them sign up for a subscription?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been told by multiple people that the set of a short drama doesn\u2019t necessarily look that different from an indie movie or commercial shoot, except everything is churned out much faster to save on costs. Whereas a traditional shoot would last weeks or months, the entire season of a vertical show is typically filmed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[540,2153,5602,860,3746,94,5601],"class_list":{"0":"post-12048","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-americans","9":"tag-china","10":"tag-dramas","11":"tag-obsessed","12":"tag-short","13":"tag-video","14":"tag-watching"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Chinese Roots<\/h2>\n