Any community can make a vertical drama. Here are the ones who did

My view: any community can now start making its own vertical drama. A vertical drama, or microdrama, is a series of short episodes, usually one to two minutes each, filmed upright to be watched on a phone. Commercial apps typically offer the first episodes free, then charge viewers or show ads. Finding an audience is a separate matter. This piece is about starting. The audience figures below are the makers' own, and the pages rarely say who the makers are.

Three LGBTQ+ series, three routes

I began with LGBTQ+ vertical series made outside Asia and the West. The ones I found came by three routes.

Coral is a Brazilian series of 50 episodes of about two minutes, about a relationship between two women. JWave, a Brazilian pop-culture site, reported that it premiered on 29 September on Raipe TV, an app for vertical series. A registry aggregator shows the company behind the app started activity in March 2026. JWave also says that about 90% of the crew are women. It gives no budget. It names no tool. The AI in its headline belongs to the plot.

O Bar Labirinto sells its own subscription. A Portal Conteúdo article of 13 July, from a Brazilian culture site, describes an independent series of ten episodes set in a fictional gay cruising bar, a place where men go to meet for sex. It is made with AI. It contains explicit scenes. The first episode is free and the subscription costs R$14.90 a month.

The third route is a television channel. Chile's Canal 13 reported close to 50 million views across its social platforms for the first weekend of Enamorada(s), which it called the first Chilean vertical series on an LGBT theme.

Only O Bar Labirinto is described as independent. It is also the one that skipped the apps and sold its own subscription.

What a season costs

Geoffrey D. Calhoun, a screenwriter whose films were released through Lifetime and Tubi, paid $10,000 in cash for ELSY, a post-apocalyptic thriller of 21 vertical episodes. He shot it in five days with a crew of eight. The season runs about 31 minutes, so roughly $320 a finished minute. The figure leaves out six months of his own unpaid preparation. He told me he paid every cast and crew member, and that about 75% of the budget went to them. The set was a studio break room. He dressed it as a bunker with removable adhesive strips, and he says that every second he spent solving problems before the cameras rolled saved money during the five shooting days. "That's what $10,000 filmmaking looks like," he said. His advice to European producers was not to "confuse vertical with cheap or disposable".

Two filmmakers in Atlanta, Andres McCorkle and Michelangelo Corkrum, say they made a 90-episode vertical drama, Mama's House, in four shooting days for "around $46,000". Bypass Hollywood, a media site, published their account on 29 May 2026. "Everything was self-taught. Self-funded," they said. One of them says his mother paid for the first production phase and a Bible study leader paid for post-production, the editing and finishing, and for marketing. Camera makers also backed them. The page values their gear at over $35,000.

For Africa, Communiqué, a newsletter on African media, wrote in April that a 60-episode microdrama "currently costs about $20,000" to produce there. It gives roughly $100,000 for the United States. For China it gives $50,000. Shorter 30-episode formats, it adds, can be made for as little as $10,000.

Generated images change the cost. Vigloo, a Korean vertical-drama app, released a 22-episode AI series in March 2026. Its creator, Benjamin Pott, put the cost at $33,000. That is eight weeks of work by fewer than ten people. Olumide Gbenro runs Ogun Studios, a studio that makes microdramas entirely with AI, with no actors and no shoot. In my interview with him he said his studio spends at least $100 a minute on generation, with three people. That covers the computing power only. He wrote that a "perfect" scene "might take us 48 tries at $10", and that he had spent over $8,000 of his own money working out his process.

In Argentina, the AI studio Gennial says a 30-episode season takes three or four days. My own test in March cost $120 for 90 seconds, and I called it, in a post, a catastrophe. The tool's safety filters refused a one-eyed cat. A character changed ethnicity in the middle of the teaser.

How they are made, and by whom

The shoot can stay small. AfriVerts, a collective of 35 South African filmmakers, announced in July a slate of vertical series shot "over five to eight days, using small crews, limited locations". It says it is built around locally owned intellectual property.

The image can be generated, and some AI video models are free to download. Alibaba's Wan 2.2 has a licence that allows commercial use. Its small version "can also run on consumer-grade graphics cards like 4090", a high-end gaming card. Gbenro uses Seedance, from ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. It cannot be downloaded.

The money can come from three places.

• The maker's own pocket, as with Calhoun.
• Friends and family, as with Mama's House.
• A public body. Kiri is the first vertical drama of Māori Television, a channel in New Zealand. It has ten episodes of three minutes and was funded by Te Māngai Pāho, the Māori broadcasting funding agency. The channel sees the format as "a vehicle for indigenous storytelling and language revitalisation".

Tamieka Briscoe, an independent filmmaker in the United States, made Separate Rooms with an all-Black cast and writing team. Her press release of 11 June says she invested her own money and that five Black women lead the production. Their backgrounds are in entrepreneurship, government, healthcare, event production and higher education, "rather than traditional Hollywood pathways". It claims more than 100,000 organic views, meaning views without paid advertising.

Others are smaller or better backed. Mansa is an app for Black stories founded by two actor-producers already working in the industry, David Oyelowo and Nate Parker. It says its first wave drew more than 6.5 million impressions and views in 30 days.

In the Brazilian state of Pará, the company Filomena Produções made A Herdeira do Veropa, an independent vertical novela set in the Ver-o-Peso market. The regional outlet Revista Cenarium reports more than 2.5 million views on social networks.

A New Zealand company run by two siblings from the Pacific community made the vertical comedy I Got You in 2022. Its producer said they wanted to "build capacity within the Pacific community to have more screenwriters".

Gbenro, who says he was born into the Yoruba ethnic group of south-west Nigeria, told me he is "very intentional" about creating work that serves the African diaspora, even if none of it is posted yet. His contractors work from Nigeria, Greece, Croatia and Malaysia.

I do not claim that the makers of the three LGBTQ+ series belong to the community they show. Money, the choice of camera and the choice of AI model did not stop these people from starting. Whether the audience follows is another question.