The six steps
- Pick a genre and write a one-line premise. Micro-dramas run on tropes: revenge, billionaire romance, werewolf mates, rebirth, mafia, hidden heirs — or the viral fruit and pet dramas. Write one sentence with who is wronged, the public conflict, and the twist the audience is waiting for.
- Write the episode script: hook, escalation, cliffhanger. Open mid-conflict within three seconds, raise the stakes every scene and end unresolved. Break it into 15-second scenes with 1–5 shots each and keep dialogue under about 34 words per scene so it can be spoken in time.
- Lock each character's look and voice. Write a fixed description for every character (age, face, hair, build, outfit) and a voice, then make one reference portrait per character. Reuse that portrait in every scene and every episode — this is what keeps faces from changing between shots.
- Render every scene with spoken dialogue. Generate each scene as vertical 9:16 video from the script, the location and the character portraits, with the dialogue spoken and lip-synced in the scene. Review each scene and re-render only the ones that drift.
- Join the scenes, add captions and an end card. Join the scenes in order, normalise the audio, burn in large high-contrast captions (most micro-drama viewers watch muted at first) and end on a “to be continued” card.
- Post, label it as AI, and keep the series going. Upload to TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts or a drama app with the AI-generated label switched on. Release episodes on a steady schedule with the same cast, each opening on the last episode's cliffhanger.
What a micro-drama episode needs
| Element | What works |
|---|---|
| Format | Vertical 9:16, 720×1280 or larger, faces filling the frame |
| Hook | Conflict on screen in the first 3 seconds — no title card, no establishing shot |
| Length | 15–60 s for social clips; 1–3 min for app episodes |
| Dialogue | Short, loaded lines; roughly 2 spoken words per second at most |
| Captions | Large, centred, high-contrast; many viewers start muted |
| Ending | Unresolved beat + a tease of the next episode |
| Cast | 2–3 characters per episode, the same faces every episode |
The manual way — and where it breaks
Done by hand, an AI drama usually takes five tools: a chatbot for the script, an image generator for the faces, a video generator for each shot, a voice tool for dialogue, and an editor to cut it together with captions. It works, but three things go wrong again and again:
- Faces drift. Each clip is generated on its own, so the heroine changes between shots unless the same reference image goes into every generation.
- Lines don’t fit. A chatbot writes dialogue that takes 40 seconds to say in a 10-second shot, and silent clips with voice-over never quite sync.
- No structure. Scripts read like short stories — slow openings, tidy endings — instead of a hook and a cliffhanger.
The one-flow way
AI Short Drama does the six steps in one place. The script generator writes the episode to the micro-drama structure with timed scenes and a character bible (free). One click renders it: each character is cast once as a reference portrait — or from a photo you add — and that portrait goes into every scene; dialogue is spoken inside each scene with lip sync; the scenes are joined into one 9:16 MP4 with captions burned in, plus a clean copy, an SRT and each scene as its own clip. Usually ready in 5–15 minutes, always within 45. A scene that drifts can be retaken on its own, and episode two continues with the same cast.
Posting your AI drama
- Turn on the platform’s AI-generated content label when you upload.
- Put the cliffhanger in the last second and the episode number in the caption (“Ep 1”).
- Post the next episode within a day or two while the hook is fresh; pin episode one to your profile.
- Don’t use real people without their consent, and don’t imitate existing shows.