Microdrama is minting a new generation of filmmakers. Take Hanzhong “Absol” Bai, a U.S. film graduate whose short feature, For Adeline, which he co-wrote and shot in 16mm film, is an exploration of aging, grief, and inter-generational connection told through silence, texture and time. Then he discovered micro drama.

“Vertical gave me a chance,” he told Janine Stein in the latest episode of the Greenlights and Ground Truths podcast.  

“As a film student, after you graduate, there's not too much choice,” he says. “You can be an assistant in Hollywood, but you start very low and you don't have any choice to make your film.”

Now executive producer at FlareFlow and based between Beijing and L.A., he has full creative control, including casting decisions, location scouting, post-production notes, the works. No gatekeepers. Little hierarchy. “I can decide the actors, I can decide location, I can decide what I want," he says. “It gives me more space for personal development.”

The cost is the toll of speed. Scripts come thick and fast. Shooting happens quickly. Post-production wraps in days. The moment one project finishes, a new one lands and gears shift relentlessly. So, for example, he can go from romance right into werewolves with little or no break. 

"You don't have time to rest,” he says

But that’s not the strangest thing. Stranger still  is teaching Hollywood veterans the microdrama ropes. 

Actors, for instance, may “know how to act, they just don’t know how to act for microdrama”. 

“When you cry [in microdrama], the audience wants to see a tear drop down,” he says. In other words, max emotion for an audience with no appetite for nuance. 

Veterans of traditional production sets are also piling in, some of them twice his age or more, with credits on, for instance, Marvel films. 

Absol recently wrapped She Means Justice, a legal drama that forced him to rethink everything he knows about micro drama storytelling. Legal content is slow, wordy, cerebral. Micro drama audiences want none of that. Yet he had to make it work anyway.

"For me it’s pretty fresh, different from the CEO, werewolf, vampire style,” he says. At the same time, “I was really afraid... I feared this is too like TV shows. It's not for verticals”. 

Before She Means Justice, legal dramas have largely failed as microdramas. “Audiences don’t want to hear a lot about legal cases, about American laws... If they want that and they have the time, they can go to Netflix,” he says. 

He solved this by treating every frame like a visual punch. No filler. Each shot had to surprise, to arrest attention, to give the audience something worth staying for.

As hopes of higher production budgets sweep through the vertical industry, Absol says if he had more money, he would spend it on locations. “Sometimes we don’t have money for really fancy places to shoot. Like, like if you want to shoot a werewolf, at least we need a castle, European style... something visually new.”

Listen to/watch the full interview on ContentAsia’s YouTube channel.