Soap experience puts All3 indie in good position to exploit development slate, head of scripted says

Hollyoaks indie Lime is moving into microdramas, the company’s co-head of scripted, kids and family, Angelo Abela has revealed.

Speaking at the Creative Cities Convention in Liverpool this week (6 May), Abelo said the company had produced two projects designed to be watched vertically on a smartphone in 90-second episodes as part of a bid to be in the vanguard of the UK microdrama movement.

According to his fellow panellist, K7 Media director of digital strategy Michelle Lin, vertical dramas in the US generated $350m revenue in a single quarter last year, and the UK “honestly isn’t that far behind” in terms of uptake.

Abela argued Lime’s experience with creating compelling drama which kept audiences coming back for more meant it was well placed to exploit the trend and “find a new audience”, at a time when “everybody’s watching their phone”.

“A microdrama has to be immediate, it has to be hooky, it has to have high production values on a very tight schedule, and we at Lime do that for continuing drama,” he said.

He said the company saw vertical dramas as “a way of developing”, allowing it to quickly try out newer ideas to understand whether they had potential to become traditionally commissioned shows, while also potentially generating income through existing microdrama platforms.

Traditional TV producers, he added, have a lot to bring to the emerging format.

“There are a lot of these mircodramas out there and many are very tropey, so what can we do to add nuance so that it plays to a different audience?” he said. “A British audience might want something different.

“For us, it’s a question of how we can be at the forefront of this, because it’s not going to go away – people are watching it now.”

He acknowledged Lime is still working out whether it can make money through existing platforms, which share early episodes on social media and charge viewers to find out what happens next, and if the indie needs to be directly involved in the monetisation process.