INTERVIEW
Gennadiy Fefelov, Vertical Drama Line Producer
Gennadiy Fefelov is a line producer at TeraVision Production in Los Angeles — the role that holds the budget and the schedule, the one who knows what each day costs. He has shot for My Drama and DramaWave. A typical series runs sixty episodes, shot in six to seven days at ten to seventeen pages a day: two to three times the pace of a feature, double that of television. Twenty to twenty-five people on set, cast excluded. One hundred to two hundred thousand dollars all in, non-union. He dates the turn to late June 2026, when platforms saw their AI experiments turn a profit and live-action orders stopped.
2026 · 30 March
Holywater's co-founder declares code red on AI usage — the highest internal alert
2026 · 7 May
A 60-episode AI-generated series takes the top spot on ByteDance's largest microdrama platform
2026 · late June
Platforms' AI experiments turn a profit; live-action orders stop in Los Angeles
2026 · 18 August
An actor working in the format reports castings falling from fifteen a day to one or two
$33k
Vigloo — 22 AI episodes, fewer than ten people
vs
$100–200k
live-action — 60 episodes, twenty-five people
Key Takeaways
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Sixty episodes, six to seven days, ten to seventeen pages a day — two to three times a feature's pace
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Late June 2026 is when replacement stopped being a slide and became a budget line that no longer exists
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Crew day rates held; lead actor rates dropped sharply once the volume went away
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Ad-funded scripts are being rewritten before the shoot — explicit scenes swapped for kisses
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No vertical industry emigrated: a music-video and commercials craft lost its orders in 2022 and changed country
Originally published on Streaming Radar