Paddy Ma Wendi, a director of vertical dramas since 2023, has had a front-row seat to how fast and hard artificial intelligence has affected the mobile-first entertainment genre in 2026.
Digital content farms have started churning out short productions – serialised stories made for smartphones and usually watched in portrait mode – using the latest AI technology.
“When I was in the US [for a live-action vertical drama], I usually hired about 20 to 30 people, including the actors,” says Ma, who graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2015 and founded one of the first production companies specialising in English-language microdramas on the United States’ East Coast.
He is currently based in Zhengzhou, in China’s Henan province, to take advantage of the relatively low labour costs there.
