For vertical studios and producers
Microdrama Series
Vertical drama, 60 to 100 episodes a season. Write for the format the phone built.
Microdrama runs 60 to 100 vertical episodes of one to three minutes and grows faster than any other corner of global entertainment. Screenburn is the first professional writing tool built for the format, from the episode engine to the season map.
The grammar of the vertical screen
Microdrama carries its own grammar: a hook inside three seconds, a cliffhanger by the minute, plot velocity that would tear a feature apart, and emotional stakes tuned for a thumb hovering over the next show. Screenburn teaches the form as you write it, holding every episode to the engine the format demands.
Two levels of architecture at once
Every episode runs hook, escalation, cliffhanger. Every season stacks those episodes into 3 to 5 arcs with turning points between them. The craft lives in writing both levels at the same time, and Screenburn plans them together: the ninety-second engine and the hundred-episode map.
Scripts a producer can schedule
Microdrama shoots lean: few locations, small casts, fast turnover. Screenburn formats your season for vertical production so the output lands on a producer's desk ready to budget and schedule. In this format, the producible script is the one that gets made.
What you get
- ✓Hook, escalation, cliffhanger: episode engine guidance
- ✓Season arc planning across 60 to 100 episodes
- ✓Cliffhanger mechanics on every episode
- ✓Vertical production constraints built into the format
- ✓Producer-ready script output
- ✓Batch episode management at season scale
Ready to write?
Screenburn is free to start. No credit card required.
Vertical drama runs on debt
Microdrama grew into the fastest-expanding format on earth, and it did it on a grammar built for the thumb. Episodes run one to three minutes. Seasons stack sixty, eighty, a hundred of them. The frame stands upright in one hand, and the first three seconds of every episode decide whether the viewer stays or swipes you into the void.
So the hook leads, and it leads hard. A ring on the wrong hand. An heir in a courier's jacket. A bride reading the wrong name at the altar. The opening seconds make a promise, and the episode spends the rest of its ninety paying it off. Warm up for half a minute and the viewer sits three shows down the feed.
The spine of every episode runs hook, escalation, cliffhanger, and the working engine expands it to five beats: hook, escalation, complication, reversal, cliffhanger. The complication and the reversal live inside the escalation, cracking the viewer's expectation open before the close. Land all five inside ninety seconds and the episode plays like a slot machine that pays out in story.
Retention rules everything in the format, and momentum wins every argument with prestige. The market settled that question: studios in China proved vertical serial drama could earn at cinema scale, the model crossed every border within a year, and platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox turned the thumb-stop into a business measured in billions.
None of that shrinks the craft. The form plays a different instrument and rewards a different hand. Compression is the art: a full emotional arc driven through a scene the length of a chorus, a hook at the front, a debt at the back, and every line cut that fails to earn its breath.
Plan the season before you draft a word of it. A hundred episodes without an arc map turns into soup by episode forty. Chain the cliffhangers, place the turning points between your 3 to 5 arcs, and know which debts each arc borrows and repays. A season is a ledger of open questions; keep the books.
Screenburn builds the five-beat engine with you, holds every opening to the three-second standard, and maps episode arcs across the full 60 to 100 episode season, with batch management for writing at that scale. The format lives or dies in its first three seconds, and the tool makes sure those seconds carry.
Put it to work
An account takes a minute, and the free tier is a working tool. No credit card.