Panel: Cinema in Portrait Mode

There is a format growing fast enough that the biggest names in Hollywood are now writing cheques to get into it. Thirty to forty scripted drama series shoot in Los Angeles every single month. A platform called ReelShort reached .2 billion in consumer spending last year, up 119 per cent. Fox Entertainment committed to more than 200 titles.

Former studio chiefs and network chairwomen are leaving conventional television to build businesses inside it. The format is vertical microdrama. Scripted, serialised drama shot in portrait mode for smartphone screens. Episodes of 60 to 90 seconds. Cliffhangers every episode. And the skills required to write, direct, and produce it are not exotic. They are an extension of what good storytellers already know - applied to formal constraints that turn out to be creatively interesting rather than limiting.

Cinema in Portrait Mode is built around two practitioners who are already working in the vertical drama economy at a serious professional level - an Emmy-nominated writer and a director with two decades of US film and television experience, both from Timber Entertainment - and a Maltese virtual production specialist who is building the infrastructure the format needs. They are here to show what the work looks like from the inside, and to answer the question every practitioner in the room is already asking: is this for me?