Introduction / Planning the Story

00:00 Micro dramas are mini TV shows made for your phone with short episodes that end on a cliffhanger. And they made about $11 billion last year. And now you can make one yourself using nothing but AI. I made a three episode series with no actors and no filming at a fraction of the cost it would normally require. If you've never seen one, this is Real Short, one of the biggest micro drama

00:22 apps. Every show on here, including fully AI generated ones, is a full movie cut into dozens of short vertical episodes. The first 10 or so are free and after that people pay to unlock the rest. And they really do pay. People spent about $750 million inside these apps in just the first 3 months of this year. In this video, I'll show you every step. Writing a story people actually

00:44 want to keep watching. Building characters that look the same in every episode. Turning them into scenes where they actually talk. Editing it into a finished episode. Making covers and a trailer that get people to click. And how these series actually make money. The first step before generating a single scene is the story. Most people skip this and go straight to making videos, but the story is what hooks viewers and keeps them coming back for

01:07 the next episode. And it's the main reason most AI dramas fail. In just the first half of this year, over 220,000 AI dramas went up on Doin, which is China's version of Tik Tok. And fewer than 1 in 200 pass 100 million views. Making the videos is easy now, which means anyone can do it. The ones that actually succeed are the ones with a story people want to keep watching. Before I write

01:30 anything, I look at what's already working. The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband, for example, has over 750 million views on Real Short. And once you watch a few of these back to back, you notice they all follow the same format. Conflict in the very first second, one big turn in the middle of every episode, and a cliffhanger that makes you go straight to the next one. I'll use that format and make up my own plot. Mine leans into mystery and

01:54 suspense instead of another billionaire romance. And it plays a little slower than most of what's on here, which is on purpose. Now, to turn my idea into a full series, I'm using the micro drama kit. It's a set of tools I built specifically for micro dramas, and it runs this entire workflow from writing the episodes to the prompts for every scene and even the series covers. You'll see every tool during this video. The kit handles the planning and the

02:17 writing. And for the actual images and video, it connects to Open Art, an all-in-one platform with every AI model I need in one place. That means everything you see generated in this video is made there. To make our script, we'll use the script maker, where I paste in my premise. 5 years after a war cut her mountain town off from the world, a librarian named Mary answers a stranger's voice on an old radio and

02:39 finds out the mayor sold out the husband she was told was dead. For the genre, I'll go with thriller, but you can choose any you like and even add your own genre. I'll set the season to 30 episodes. And then there's the setting that matters most, and it's the reason a general chatbot won't get you there, the payw wall cliffhanger, which I put at the end of episode 10. Apps like Real Short and Drama Box lock everything behind a payw wall after roughly 10

03:03 episodes, which means episode 10 needs to be the biggest cliffhanger of the season yet, otherwise nobody pays for the next one. If you'll publish your micro dramas on social media, this matters less, but it's still important. I also add notes on the cast. Mary, her son Ben, Tilbury, the mayor, her husband Jake, and Julius, the voice on the radio. That way, it sticks to my characters instead of inventing new

03:25 ones. Then I click create my series Bible, and it generates the entire show for me. The log line, every character with what they want and what they're hiding, and the season split into parts. You don't have to be a writer for this. You bring the idea and the script maker builds the rest around the same format the top microdramas use. Then I plan the first 10 episodes and each one comes back with a hook, the main moments and a

03:48 cliffhanger. Episode 1 opens on a stranger's voice saying the town's name through the static and ends on the mayor alone in his storoom secretly using that same radio. At this point, I haven't generated a single frame yet, and I already know who everyone is, what they're hiding, and how the first 10 episodes end. But none of that matters if the characters don't stay consistent from one episode to the next.